Contact Center Dashboard

An award winning customer service support system built to enhance health care concierges’ ability to provide world-class service to UPMC Health Plan insurance members.

Background

UPMC Health Plan is the second-largest health insurer in western Pennsylvania and offers a range of insurance products and services that impact the lives of over 2.3 million members.

In 2019, executive leadership identified the need for a more user-friendly system to help support the 500+ health care concierge employees that service phone and chat communications with members.

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Project Details

For this project I performed a variety of UX and project management roles and had a chance to contribute throughout the entire software development lifecycle. I worked closely with another UX designer and used a mix of collaborative and independent practices to help turn system requirements into an interactive prototype ready for development.

My Contributions

UX Research

UX Design

Challenge

UPMC’s concierges’ were required to access an average of 14+ systems per call and remember how to use over 40 systems in total to help answer member questions. Each of these systems required a different login ID, password, had different timeout restrictions, and most had poor usability.

Managing so many systems caused frustration for both UPMC employees as well as members on the phone waiting while concierge’s struggled to access systems to retrieve health plan information. Weeks of comprehensive training were required to familiarize new concierges with all the systems they were expected to understand.

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Solution

When I was brought into the Contact Center Dashboard (CCD) project it had already been an active initiative for several years and had collected a myriad of requested features and requirements from different stakeholders throughout UPMC Health Plan.

Discovery Research

The first step in establishing a solution was to help the executive leadership team of the Member Service Department consolidate and prioritize the documented requirements that already existed.

After understanding the needs of the business, the next step was to investigate the user experience of UPMC’s Member Service concierges.

Quantitative Research

I preformed analysis of 3+ years of call center metric data to assess trends and frequency of member insurance issues.

I used a combination of Jupyter Notebooks and Excel to help sift through hundreds of internal service codes used in documenting over 3 million member calls.

Validating Statistical Findings

We followed up the statistical analysis with user interviews and surveys to ensure that the data was actually reflective of the work experience of concierges.

New Insights

This process uncovered some pain points related to call documentation that indicated concierges may not always accurately document call issues if they couldn’t find the appropriate code in the old system.

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Qualitative Research

To document the experience of concierges answering calls with members, our team conducted over 60 hours of shadowing.

We selected representatives across all of UPMC Health Plans insurance lines of business and sought out employees with a variety of experience levels.

Our team focused on documenting systems, processes, pain points, and emotions associated with servicing high frequency member calls.

Our quantitative investigation gave us a framework for identifying specific types of member issues to pay attention to and helped us develop questions to help probe deeper and draw more feedback from our research participants.

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Designing the New System

Building off the insights from our research and discovery phases of the project, the design team had a roadmap of high-impact improvements we wanted to include in the new system design that would both satisfy our business stakeholders requirements and meet the day-to-day needs of health care concierges.

Agile Design Approach

Our project’s use of Agile methodologies allowed us to iteratively wireframe, user test, prototype, and finish the high-fidelity designs for the system on a feature-by-feature basis. This approach also allowed us to work closely with our developer counterparts and revise designs based off of technical constraints very quickly.

Ultimately, we were able to handoff core system features and planned architecture to our development team in about 6 weeks.

Following the initial delivery of designs, our team continued to work with product managers to begin research and design of additional features so our system could continue to meet emerging needs of our users.

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Results

Improvement Metrics

Within six months of the release of the Contact Center Dashboard to Member Service team, UPMC Health Plan already recorded major benefit as a result of the new system.

The improved usability of CCD reduced the amount of time required to teach concierges how to use legacy systems by two weeks, saving a substantial amount of money.

Additionally, because CCD was built specifically to match the workflow of UPMC Health Plan agents, calls were easier to service resulting in less overtime spent researching and documenting in the old systems. Not only did this save the business money, but concierges reported an improvement in their job satisfaction with the new interface.

Finally, UPMC insurance customers spent less time waiting on the phone for concierges to verify their account and answer common questions. Customer satisfaction levels remained high and first call resolution scores experienced an improvement as concierges had better tools to understand the member and their specific insurance needs.

Reactions to CCD

Awards

• 2021 Gold Stevie for Innovation in Customer Service
• 2022 Gold Stevie for Best Use of Technology in Customer Service

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