Humana Gives Voice to a Healthy 2020

Looking back at 2019, one of the underlying debates of the global contact center industry was whether or not voice will continue to have a place in the increasingly digital world of customer service.  While it appears that new generation customers; i.e., Millennials and Generation Z, have a perceived preference for digital communications, I believe that debate over the preference for digital versus voice communications in the contact center is being supplanted by a customer service practice that offers a more universal appeal – the personalized customer experience.

Nothing exemplifies the personalized customer experience better than the optimized customer interaction provided by Predictive Behavioral Routing.  Predictive Behavioral Routing is the first solution to revolutionize contact center call routing in decades.  Rather than simply routing an incoming customer call to the first available or longest available agent, or the agent group with a defined set of basic skills, Predictive Behavioral Routing connects the customer to the service representative based on the customer’s personality, behavioral history, and communications preferences.  These highly defined customer traits have their foundation in advanced analytics, as well as in the industry’s largest database of customer behavioral profiles garnered from customer information captured on quality management recordings and carefully analyzed for communications patterns, language choices and other communications metrics.

It is also important to understand that in the optimized customer experience, voice still matters.  Research conducted by Saddletree Research in conjunction with the not-for-profit National Association of Call Centers (NACC) underscores this fact given that data shows voice communication to be ubiquitous in the contact center today.  The below graphic represents customer communications channels supported in North American contact centers at the end of 2019.

Source:  Saddletree Research

Humana is a health insurance company based in Louisville, Kentucky, with over 16 million customers and a highly rated Medicare program. As a participant in the extremely competitive health insurance industry, Humana is constantly seeking a competitive edge, which led them to implement Predictive Behavioral Routing as a means of personalizing their customers’ service experience.  According to Humana, the intelligent routing of calls to the best available agent based upon customer personality and behavioral data resulted in the realization of additional revenue opportunities, cost savings and an overall operational improvement of seven percent.

In their 2018 earnings call, Humana CEO Bruce Broussard cited Predictive Behavioral Routing as a key strategy to the company’s competitive success:

“Another key element of our strategy is to simplify processes and improve the member or patient experience by removing the friction points for our members and providers.

We have implemented sophisticated analytics to drive predictive call routing, including analytics that match members with the most appropriate representative based on member communication style and the reason for the call.

These initiatives improve customer satisfaction and reduce call transfers by nearly 153,000 or approximately 12% for the first quarter of 2018 as compared to the first quarter of 2017.”

It is also interesting to note that according to the U.S. Census Bureau, 10,000 people a day turn 65 years of age.  This represents a significant Medicare business opportunity for all insurance companies.  Medicare service providers, such as Humana, are entitled to financial incentives if the reach a given customer service rating.  Customer experience is one of the inputs in the determination of these Medicare ratings among all insurance service providers.  Predictive Behavioral Routing provides Humana with a significant competitive edge in earning Medicare service business via its personalized customer experience.

Predictive Behavioral Routing leverages over 20 years of analytics expertise and proprietary algorithms that work together to enable greater understanding of each customer’s personality, behavioral characteristics, and communication preferences. In the case of Humana and its 65 million customer contacts annually, these state-of-the-art capabilities have led to significant improvements in customer satisfaction, as noted in Humana CEO Broussard’s statement.

These results are representative of the power behind the personalized customer experience and its impact on optimized customer service.  To discover more regarding this call routing revolution and to better understand how Predictive Behavioral Routing is poised to redefine the personalized customer experience, download the Saddletree Research-authored white paper analysis of Predictive Behavioral Routing, which can be found here.