Case Study: A Fortune 500 Healthcare Company

The Fortune 500 health insurance provider serves millions of Americans through employer, individual, and specialty insurance policies. With such a large and complex population spanning the entire nation, there are countless reasons to reach out to policyholders. The company operates a significant outbound call center to meet those needs. By switching to Outbound Engagement, it dramatically improved the productivity and effectiveness of the outbound operation. With outsized improvements in cost, agent idle time, and call volume, outbound contacts are rising in organizational profile, providing a template for further improvements and efficiencies.

01 Before

Heavy constraints on time-sensitive outbound contacts

The health insurance company migrated to an outbound platform that disguised several weaknesses. The platform required agents to be assigned to separate skill groups for each campaign, and the platform put hard limits on agent re-skilling. Furthermore, the need to spin up-skill groups and assign agents before launching a campaign delayed time-sensitive calls and meant agents could be completely idle during the administrative changeover. Campaigns could take up to three months to fully define, staff, and deploy.

These constraints had a significant impact on the company’s ability to contact customers in a timely fashion. The organization suffered high agent idle times with no obvious cause, high call abandon rates, and inexplicably low call volumes.

02 Desire to change

Peeling back the onion of poor performance

With millions of customers depending on the organization, it could no longer afford to sit by and accept the subpar performance of its engagement platform. It was a challenge to sort through the issues and get the vendors involved to acknowledge the root causes.

“We had a lot of compliance issues, and a lot of productivity issues. I had to spend a lot of time figuring out why it wasn’t effective,” said a dialer team representative who prefers not to be named.

Eventually, the company uncovered one of the most serious undisclosed limitations of its system: a throttle of just three calls per second. This limit was established between the software platform and the telecommunication provider, without disclosing the limitation to the organization. The throttle was responsible for agents sitting idle anywhere from 10 to 60 minutes or more, despite the call volume waiting in the queue.

“Outbound Engagement has dramatically reduced our campaign rollout time from months to hours, saved 96% on initial setup costs, improved call abandonment rates by 8-20x, reduced agent idle time to less than a minute, and achieved over $1 million in annual cost savings. From the beginning, Outbound Engagement was the front-runner thanks to their phenomenal price point and exceptional support.”

Team Representative

03 NiCE solution

Revitalizing the outbound operation with Outbound Engagement

After executive leadership was alerted to the underlying problems, they started looking for alternatives. “Outbound Engagement, was very much the front-runner from the beginning, not only because of the value they provided but for the support and quick responses from the team - Day One,” the representative said.

The health insurance company went live in September 2024 with the first outbound campaign, adding IVR capabilities just weeks later. After some time, the in-house sales organization, which had been constrained by a policy of fully manual dialing, embraced the Outbound Engagement solution. “Now our group is crossing the spectrum, from informational calling to contractual calling for sales,” the representative said.

Outbound Engagement’s flexible capabilities have supported the ability to across both predictive dialing as well as a TCPA-focused approach using Outbound Engagement’s Human Call Initiator (HCI) to accelerate outreach in a manual manner.

“HCI has been huge, including the ability to customize down to area code and removing the need for redundant campaigns,” the representative said.

The improved solution has bolstered the company’s confidence to meet the ever-present need for emergency contacts across the United States. When populous states like California and Florida experience frequent weather or fire-related alerts, call volumes to affected customers are routinely in the millions. These extremely high-volume campaigns previously had to be outsourced due to the poor performance of the incumbent solution but are now being brought back in-house.

Outbound Engagement has also been easy to deploy to business partners and easy to adjust on the fly, expanding internal perceptions of what calling can do. “Outbound calling was in a dark corner, no one really talked to us,” the representative said. “The move to Outbound Engagement has changed that drastically and put us in front of our executive leadership and business partners, and everyone is amazed.” approved.

04 Results

Orders of magnitude greater performance

Four hours after the outbound dialing group launched the first Outbound Engagement campaign, the campaign owner sent frantic messages demanding to know why the queue was empty. The worry was that Outbound Engagement had crashed or failed, but the explanation was simply that Outbound Engagement had shattered performance expectations. “We explained that it was because the campaign was done. A single campaign was something that used to take days to complete,” the representative said. “And that was a shock factor on Day One that sent ripples across the enterprise.”

Outbound Engagement has proven both highly scalable and budget-friendly, with initial setup costs in the tens of thousands compared to seven-figure startup fees from other providers. The consumption-based pricing also meshes with spending priorities. “The cost is much better with Outbound Engagement, and we aren’t constrained to use per-agent licensing, which I find is far more expensive for far less productivity,” said the representative.

Today, a typical outbound campaign can be launched in a matter of minutes, compared to delays of up to three months on the previous solution. With the usability of Outbound Engagement, emergency campaigns can be defined and started in just seconds. Call abandonment rates are routinely below one percent, and HCI has helped retain as much as 80% of the productivity of predictive dialing while mitigating TCPA risk. Productivity overall is higher while holding FTE counts level.

05 Future

Imagining new possibilities in customer outreach

The elevated profile of outbound calling has multiple business units interested in joining, which could quadruple the number of agents in the near future. The group also expects to explore the prospects of adding AI capabilities to the Outbound Engagement IVR and reintroducing predictive dialing within compliance boundaries.

Unifying SMS and email outreach inside Outbound Engagement is also on the horizon. “Different people and different age ranges react differently to channels, so we’re interested in customizing our outreach efforts based on populations, reaching the most people with the best effort,” the representative said. “Because of the tools Outbound Engagement offers, it is going to become our standard engagement solution for everyone to use, so I only see our opportunities growing.”