Cigna Case Study: Saving Time and Money with Contact Center Automation

Hi, everyone. This is Vicky Harrell, executive director of SWPP, and welcome to our web web seminar today. We are having a case study, with Cigna. They’re gonna talk about saving time and money with contact center automation. We are so excited to have them with us today. This was presented at the SWPP annual conference, but if you were there and didn’t get to see it, you have your opportunity now. So we are so excited. And we have Shannon Scott and Kevin Pickett from Cigna with us today. And we have Larry Swift from Intra Diem. So we are very excited about this great web seminar today. I do wanna get everybody ready to get in the chat. That’s how you’re gonna interact with the panelists. They’re gonna ask you some questions and wanna hear from you. And we want you to use the chat. Make sure that your chat on the bottom right hand side of your screen is said that it’s sending to everyone so that everybody can see. And we wanna start out today by asking you if you wanna put in there how large is your contact center operation. We just wanna get some feedback from you and see, how how large your organization is before we get started. So if if you wanna put that in the chat again and send to everyone and let us know how large you are. Looks like several people are saying good morning to Kevin and Shannon. Okay. We got fifteen thousand to a hundred and fifty. Three hundred and sixty five to ten thousand. Twenty to forty and, four thousand. So we’ve got a wide range of folks here. Fifty thousand. And what does Cigna have, you guys? We have about ten thousand agents. Okay. Well, you’re not the biggest on here now. I was gonna say, well, yeah, and then some of the other kinda disparate call centers that that Shannon supports, a little less so on my side. We’re about fifteen ish thousand, but by no means the biggest tier. Four hundred k. That is Oh my goodness. That’s a big one. Wow. That’s a big one. And, again, we’ve got people from, you know, a hundred and fifty, twenty to forty agents, five hundred agents. We got lots of different sizes here. Four hundred thousand. Wow. Okay. Alright. Well, we are so excited for this web seminar today, and I’m gonna go ahead and turn it over to Larry and let him get started. Thanks, everybody. Thanks, Vicky. And so so welcome, everybody. Really excited to do this webinar with Cigna and really hear their story of automation. My name is Larry Swift. I head up our solution consulting group here at Intradium. Been with the company a little over thirteen years, so, really moderating, the conversations. As Vicky said, chat’s in the bottom right. As as the team goes through their journey, we will stop and do q and a after each slide. So have those questions ready. We want this to be very interactive. Shannon? Thanks, Larry. Hello, everybody. Thanks for joining today. My name is Shannon Scott. I am with Cigna. I’ve been with Cigna for about four years, and, I lead a team dedicated to automation. So you can probably piece piece together that that is primarily done through IntraDiem, but that is what we do all day every day. We’re out there talking to our users, to the agents, supervisors, managers, seeing what’s working for them, what’s not working for them, ideating new ideas, new use cases that we can deploy, and then seeing those through to actual deployment, fruition, and then any follow-up support that’s needed. Kevin, I’ll pass off to you. Yeah. Thanks, Shannon. Good morning, everybody. My name is Kevin Pickett. I have the privilege of working with Shannon Scott primarily, but a few other folks here at Cigna, and we have responsibilities overall, the short range forecasting, scheduling, and, of course, as Shannon is here to we’re here to talk about. Been here about five ish or so years, about twenty or so years in the industry across different verticals. I’ve had the opportunity to interact with with Larry actually at other companies back in the day, but nevertheless happy to be here. So, Larry, turn it back to you. Thanks, Kevin. And so before we get started with the the Cigna story, I wanna just level set on what type of automation we’re talking about today. When you think about your contact center tech stack, you have all the major players like speech analytics, workforce, etcetera. And, really, if you’re not familiar with Intradium, Intradium has created a new silo of tech stack into your contact center. It’s not replacing anything that you currently have, but rather it sits in between your WFM and ACD, technologies. And with that technology, from an ACD perspective, this allows us to get real time skill and queue statistics, such as calls in queue, longest call waiting as examples. It also allows us to read real time agent phone state and take action on that. So if I see an agent has a customer on hold, as an example, for thirty seconds, maybe I wanna pop an automated alert directly to that agent to check back in with the customer. Just an example of really what some of the automations Intrigue is doing. Also, with the WFM integration, Shannon and Kevin will talk about, how they use this with breaks. But we also have the ability to do automated exception write backs real time to WFM schedules as well. We go forward one more slide. Now as you think about your technologies and understanding who Intradium works with, the good news is we are not tied to a specific WFM or telephony system. As you see, whether it’s cloud or on prem, we are working with all the major providers out there in the contact centers today. With that being said, I’m gonna go ahead and hand it off to Shannon to really talk about how Cigna saved time and money with automation. Wonderful. Alright. So first, I’ll give a little bit of background on who we are as a contact center. So in the beginning of conversation, I mentioned, from a automation perspective, we’re supporting about ten thousand agents across the enterprise. As Kevin mentioned, we got we have some additional auxiliary groups, some back office groups that add to that total, but when we talk about automation, it’s that that ten k audience. All of our agents are one hundred percent work from home, so we are obviously a fully remote environment. And then you can see the different providers that we have listed there. So I do wanna expand a little bit in terms of the calls that we take. So you can see that we we take both a mix of inbound and outbound calls. But in terms of the the type of conversations that are hat that are being had, we vary from, like, your kinda typical customer service calls of, hey. What’s going on with my claim? To figuring out prescription needs. But we also have health coaches who are working one on one with eight or, people to to meet their health goals as well as a behavioral health aspect of supporting some of those mental health or, behavioral health needs. And so kind of a wide variety of conversations that that are being had across the enterprise. And, fortunately, we’ve been able to find ways for automation to exist in all of those different areas. Looks different for everybody, but that’s the cool thing, with automation is that it’s not cut and dry, and it’s it’s something that we can customize to to each specific area. So we’re gonna start off big with kind of what our first game changer has or what our biggest game changer has been with automation, and that is we have stopped prescheduling paid breaks. And I’m guessing just by saying that statement probably causing a little bit of heartburn for some folks but stick with me. I promise I’ll walk you through it. So this is something where it’s not in place for all ten thousand of our agents just yet, probably about twenty percent of that audience. But this is a program that our operations group actually came up with where they wanted to empower their agents to be able to take their breaks at a time that’s convenient for them. And the, assumption at the time or the original plan was going to be that the adherence hit would just be baked in and the adherence goal would be lowered to account for that thirty minutes of break time out of adherence every day. That’s until my team got wind of it, and we said, oh, no. No. No. We can help out with that. So we have a process in place that watches for when agents put themselves into a break aux state and just kinda puts them into this little holding pattern, if you will. And then when they come back and they move themselves into a ready aux or I’m sorry, a ready state or any other type of productive aux, then we can say, oh my goodness, you’re back. We missed you so much. I’m gonna celebrate this by adding a code to your schedule. And then that triggers a write back to their schedule, like Larry mentioned, of the duration of time that they spent in that break auth state. So there are some guardrails with this, but I will start off by saying that this is a voluntary program. I mentioned it’s for about two thousand of our agents right now, but we have a ninety seven percent participation rate. So I’m gonna pause there for a moment just to to plant that seed that two thousand agents that breaks no longer have to be scheduled for. Think of that from a scheduling perspective. They don’t have to be scheduled. They don’t have to be optimized. They don’t have to be moved for for team meetings or town halls or other types of events. They just happen automatically. Yeah. That’s great, Shannon. And and when you think about that, all the stuff that you talked about going to, hey. Welcome back to doing the updates, That’s all automation. Right? That’s there’s no manual intervention required on any of that. Okay. Absolutely. Absolutely. And we build off that automation as well because there are guardrails in place where, just for our program specifically, we don’t allow agents to take their break within the first thirty minutes of their shift, the last thirty minutes of their shift, or bookend on either at either side of their scheduled or set scheduled lunch. And if they do, then the write back doesn’t occur. They take that adherence hit for the day. But I see a question in there about the duration of breaks, and that’s the cool thing with this program is with that we have that flexibility of where, the agents are instructed you have thirty minutes of break time per day. We just ask that they take their breaks in increments or at least a ten minutes minimum at a time. So that gives them even more flexibility about how long to make their breaks. Vast majority of folks are still taking two fifteen minute breaks, but we’re seeing some popularity with three ten minute breaks per day. I’ve seen somebody must have had a bad morning, they took a twenty minute break in the morning and then a ten minute break in the afternoon. So it puts them in the driver’s seat of having that control over their day, and that’s where we’ve seen a lot of positive feedback and, a lot of agent satisfaction coming out of this is that they’re not subjected to being told when to do everything throughout their day. They can, they’re in control and and they have the say, I guess, of of how they wanna spend their day. Excellent. So we have a question from Saurabh. How do you protect service levels? What if several of the two k go for breaks when contacts are in queue? Yeah. I’ll I’ll address that one if you don’t mind. The short answer is we’re fully dispersed. We’re fully work at home, and that two k is representative of multiple queue types. So the short answer is we’re taking advantage of our flexibility in our work environment in that our staff isn’t in the same spot. They don’t really coordinate their breaks. They’re taking breaks at odd time space that is fueled by things happening in their day, and we are seeing through testing and, again, scale of this program, they are dispersing the breaks for us, and we don’t have to do anything about it. We were cognizant of that risk, and we remain cognizant of that risk. However, we do believe it’s diminished because we are fully work from home. I don’t have questions at this point. Okay. So the only other well, actually, no. I’ll throw some numbers out at at everybody. So, in terms of the impact this has had, I I mentioned that we’ve had a lot of positive feedback. Agents are really liking this program. From a WFM perspective, for the last six months of twenty twenty three, so July through December, we had ninety three thousand breaks that were automatically written back to schedules. And then come back to my my future or my previous comment about the reduction of need from the scheduling perspective that’s that frees up our schedulers to be able to focus on other tasks other than just making sure that that breaks are in their schedules. Shift beds, I know are a hot topic, but that gives them more time to to work on those. We have also seen our availability or our on production time increased by a sustained three percent, as well as our voluntary attrition has gone down by about one percent. Now to be fair, not gonna say that the reduction in voluntary attrition is solely contributed to this, but I’m not not saying it isn’t. So we’re seeing good numbers all around the board. I did see one question pop up, and and you guys are asking great questions. They’re going by really quickly here, but I I did see something about the time frame of breaks, I believe. Forgive me. I can’t find the immediate question, but, I think I saw a couple in there. So the the cool thing about this is because we have that automation to do the write backs, it’s much more visible to the supervisors or to a manager, whoever is monitoring these the staff. It’s much more visible who’s taking breaks and for how long. So if somebody is, you know, taking twenty minute breaks three times a day, it’s gonna be smack in their schedule versus if we did not have this automation, if we did not have the write backs, it would just show that they were out of adherence and people would have somebody would have to go through all of the aux reporting, all of the logs to figure out where did they spend their time. This is just not right there in front of them. And I’ve oh, go ahead, Larry. Sorry, Shannon. There there’s multiple questions around how do you guys, handle if agents see calls in queue? Are they still going to breaks, or are they being compliant with call taking? Kevin, did you wanna take that one or no? I would be I’d be happy to. Our guidance is you’re going to take your break. We need you to take your break. There are obviously state laws that that preclude that you as an individual need to take a break to make sure that you can be the best version of you as possible. The guidance that and, again, our leaders are carrying to their teams are if there’s a call in queue, take the call, of course. Certainly. But if you need to take your break, take your break. That that there is not a a hard and fast rule to say just because there’s calls in queue, don’t take your breaks, for multiple reasons. A, we would have scheduled them that way anyway, potentially. And then, b, if it’s the if we empower the employees to make good decisions and we say we trust them to make good decisions, then let’s let’s trust them to make good decisions. And what we are seeing, going back to my earlier comment, through dispersion of our workforce and the dispersion of the breaks, and you can see the example here where it’s odd times. They are working around phone calls. So we are seeing some benefit in that space as well. It’s just a matter of we aren’t enforcing it because we don’t think that’s the right thing to do. So I do see a question for Intradium. Does Intradium recommend future breaks when service levels are good so that agents can take them rather than just random breaks that could impact the queue? Short answer is yes. We have a a lot of customers that leverage idle time throughout the day to fill those with pockets of maybe a surprise break or a recognition break or, you know, anniversary break. All of those are possible with this. Who is responsible for entering the break time in the system? Is that team leader or WFM? So that that’s the great part about this automation is that nobody has to enter that break time. It’s all through the power of automation where we are using Intradaym to track how long they spend in break and then using that time duration to generate the write back to the schedule. So those ninety three thousand breaks that I mentioned earlier, that’s all automation. Those are all breaks that were entered into our WFM system by Intradium that somebody did not have to manually put into the brakes. Excellent. Yeah. I did see just a quick comment. There was a question of if we’re just doing the breaks, and the answer is yes. In our program, the way we’ve deployed it, we are just allowing the choose your own breaks. We are still scheduling lunches for these employees. This is an earlier question up in the thread. And then a question just came in. What’s what’s your average agent tenure? I guess it should be high for this model to work as is it hard for us to as it is for us for high tenure LOBs. So All over. Sorry. I I jumped in on that, Shannon. Just like every call center, we do have a a, you know, relatively nominal, right, level of attrition in all of our groups. So the short answer is we have people that have been here for fifteen to twenty years. We have people who have been here for fifteen or twenty days, and we’re not precluding any of those from being in or out of the program. What we are doing, and back to Shannon’s point, we’re allowing them to select in or out from this at the the groups that are being used from a pilot perspective. Those who find themselves in a position where they can’t manage their time well, their supervisor may help them make the decision to move back to a more static break environment. But what we’re finding, back to Shannon’s earlier bullet, we’re seeing a high success rate. I believe it’s ninety seven percent are still in this model, and it’s working exceptionally well. Yeah. That’s great. Question. Did I hear a three percent increase in scheduled adherence by doing this? It was a three percent increase in our, on production time. So what to to expand on that then, previously, when breaks were prescheduled, agents would find find time to take a break. They would find the opportunity to either stay in ACW longer or put themselves in the personal locks to run to the restroom or whatever the case is needed. They were finding those breaks. They don’t have to do that anymore. So now that since they do have that say of, you know, I’m just I need a break. I’m gonna I’m gonna go right now, and I don’t have to wait for somebody to tell me to go over from when it’s scheduled. That’s what’s driving the increase in our our on production or I I said the word availability earlier. That might have caused the confusion, but that’s where the increase is. It’s our actual time spent on the phone. Excellent. Is the max break duration a cumulative total of the day or at the break level? It is a a total duration for the day. And there are there are caveats for folks that don’t work a traditional eight hour day. You know, folks that are part time or if they they do, like, a four, ten shift. Of course, there’s more more break time built into that. But, essentially, they’re the the agents are told, here’s the amount of break time that you have per day. Take it as you wish. Break it up as you need to. We just have the request for going back to Kevin’s comment earlier about the well-being of our staff that they do it at at least ten minutes at a time. Got it. I think the question for me, which all telephony systems can this be integrated with? And if we already have scheduled a break in IEX, for example, how does Intradene work in this model? So all the major telephony systems via your Avaya’s, Genesys, Cisco, Five nine, just to name a few we have out of the box integrations with. As far as predetermined breaks, another way that our cost customers leverage this is let’s say that somebody gets stuck on a long call and it runs into their break. We have the ability to automatically shift that to reflect the time that they went. Or similar to what these guys are doing, what if I have a predetermined break, which is different, but I’m five minutes before and I’m sitting idle? Maybe we offer through it to shift up five minutes to really take advantage of an idle time versus getting stuck on a long call. Alright. Would there be any correlation between a group’s occupancy and the effectiveness of this? Example, a larger, more occupied group being more successful than a smaller one. I think that’s a fair correlation. Kinda coming back to some of the other comments and and questions I’ve been asked, this is not a program that could be appropriate for everybody. We do have some very small lines of businesses, you know, with, ten, fifteen agents. Those ones we probably would not introduce this to because of the staffing considerations and not wanting everybody to potentially go at the same time. And so we we do have more success with the the larger organizations with the larger lines of businesses where there is that more inherent dispersion across the across the board. Got it. Now are you guy do you guys have any, compliance state local guidelines for when breaks occur? If so, can you kinda talk about how you guys handle that? Absolutely. So there depending on where you personally have call contact centers located, there are some states with very strict, requirements. So, definitely, if this is something you’re you’re thinking about for yourself, definitely talk with your HR department, your legal department, make sure that they have buy in and they’re aware of what’s happening. Our our groups gave us the blessing because the breaks are still being offered to agents. They they are not being restricted. Like, we’re not we’re not saying you can’t take a break. It’s just now instead of telling the agent when they can go, the agent decides for themselves. And so it’s now up to the employee to be compliant with with the the necessary requirements. But that has alleviated a lot of the burden for us of, you know, again, breaks are still being offered. They’re not being told they can’t go. It’s just it’s more now in their hands. So there’s there was a question about where Intradiem is placed. And so, really, this sits in between your WFM and ACD systems, gathering data through out of the box integrations. It’s a hosted solution. And, yes, it’s not replacing anything that you currently have. Will the agent adherence get impacted because they they took all their breaks in the first two hours of the day? So it depends on the I I guess it depends on the the specific automation pieces that you set up. So we specifically have configuration in place where if they take a break within the first thirty minutes of their shift, the write back will not occur. So they would automatically take the the adherence hit that way. If they take the rest of their break time in the following ninety minutes, so still within the first two hours of their shift, okay. Great. But then they’re out of break time for the rest of the day. So if they then take any additional break time, they would be subject to the the adherence hit. Got it. Gosh. The questions just keep coming. This is great. Is there an ID ideal contact center size and handle time range that this would be ideal for? Now as you guys mentioned, you got multiple sizes of queues, and I’m assuming different handle times that you’re leveraging this with. Right? Yeah. Absolutely. It’s kind of all across the board. So, Kevin, also curious if you have any thoughts here. But I would say ideal size, you’d probably wanna be maybe fifty agents or more for that specific call type. And then HT range, in all honesty, I I’m thinking the only thing that jumps out at me is if your HT HT is generally like over an hour, that may not be the best suited for it for for this type of program. We do have some of those coaches or some of those nurses that I mentioned at the beginning where they do have really long handle times. We’re not approaching them with with this type of consideration just because of the unique nature of them. And I gotta give Kevin two notes. He’s doing a great job on getting to a lot of these questions. Yes. Alright. So I’m gonna pause questions just so that we can move on to to the next use case that you guys really saw a lot of benefit on. So keep the questions coming, but I I really wanna make sure that we get to all the good stuff that Cigna’s doing. Awesome. Thank you. Yes. Love the questions. Definitely, please keep them coming. Alright. So the next use case that we are, that we have implemented is what we refer to as incremental VTO. So everybody here is probably very familiar with VTO when you release people for the day because you have that excess staff. Cigna is not immune to that. We we definitely participate in that, but we do also have days and weeks, times throughout the year where we have that excess capacity where we’re over performing on our goals, but not enough to release people for the day. We have these pockets throughout the day where we we have extra folks. We pull those levers to get people off the phone for training or team meetings or coaching or whatever the case may be, but we still have some folks sitting around. But, again, not enough to release for the day. So we’ve interpreted that into what we refer to as incremental BTO, which is extra unpaid breaks throughout the day or extended lunches. So this kind of piggybacks off of what we just talked about previously with the extra breaks of where, If somebody has utilized all of their paid break time, they may still be subject to an extra unpaid break. And I wanna draw a distinction here of where you may already be familiar with reward breaks or bonus breaks, something along those lines. That is not this. This is purely a cost saving measure where we are trying to get folks off the phone and in an unpaid state for fifteen minutes at a time to just get them off the phone and then save some dollars along the way. So what this manifests is as we are monitoring our queue conditions and monitoring to see where we at performance wise. Do we have that capacity? Do we have that idle time? Do we have people just sitting there twiddling their thumbs? And we use that through IntraDium. If yes, then it automatically kicks out a question to our agents to just say, hey. Do you wanna take an extra unpaid break? We’re very clear that it’s unpaid so there’s not any confusion. And if somebody accepts that, then they, then we use IntraDMs to automatically add a code to their schedule so they’re not out of adherence, and we also log them out of their ACD. And the important part of that is the ACD is what feeds into our payroll system. So if they’re not logged into the ACD, then that time is unpaid. The agent then goes on, takes their break. They come back, log back in, and and resume their day as normal. Kind of a similar process with our extended lunches as well of where we’re looking at that thirty minute, window leading up to their prescheduled lunch, and looking to see, do we have that capacity? And anywhere within that window, agents may get an opportunity to extend their lunch. And so I say anywhere within that window because it could be their lunch is extended by ten minutes, by seventeen minutes, or by the full thirty minutes. So both of those kinda work hand in hand. And with what we’re looking at on the chart here, is what our calendar year of twenty twenty three looked like with the results for this. So to provide some context, within the healthcare industry, which Cigna is, the beginning of the year is our peak period and we don’t really have a lot of capacity so that’s why you’re seeing some pretty low numbers in January and February. We did scale this program and quadrupled our number of users throughout the year. So those spikes and those increases that you see, they are not a reflection that Cigna does not know how to manage our capacity, but rather they reflect that there’s additional folks who are able to take advantage of this. So when we add up all of the hours that were saved in combination of the extra breaks as well as the extended lunches for the year twenty twenty three, that resulted in, about eighty seven hundred hours, which is about four FTE. And for us, that’s the equivalent of about quarter of a million dollars. So that may not sound super impressive to some, but let’s let’s put some perspective on that one. This is all savings that were realized automatically. Literally, nobody had to lift a finger for this. So we can go back to operations and say, hey. We saved you the salaries of four agents, but you didn’t actually lose those people. There was no hit to your attrition, no hit to your turnover costs, and the savings just happened literally in the back of just in just in the peripheral. Like, nobody had to lift the finger. Nobody had to do anything for it. It just happened automatically. So this is a huge win for us in terms of just the dollar savings, but it also gives agents the time to break up their day and and decide and be more empowered of of how they want to, spend their day. That that’s a big thing. That’s a big thing that we’re focusing on here is is the agent empowerment piece. Well, I think it’s a big thing we hear across the community is you introduced this pandemic that turned into virtual work at home and at best maybe hybrid, but that flexibility is key to retaining employees and good employees. So I think this is a great way to think think outside of the box and really give those opportunities when there’s pockets of time. Absolutely. Absolutely. Alright. I see there’s lots of questions popping in there. Are there any that we wanna address, Larry? Yeah. There was a question. Are you are you guys deployed to just your in house agents or third party as well? Go for it, Kevin. So I’m gonna start, Shannon. You can, by all means, tackle in. The short answer is we’re internal at this point, not because we don’t wanna be with our BPOs. If we have worked through, we had an initial test that there were some co employment concerns we are working out. We actually, later this year, are gonna be working on trying to revamp the how that relationship would would look, as well as rolling out specific functions that we believe are appropriate for our relationships that we have with our various BPOs. I do believe, and and, Larry, I’ll let you maybe talk to this, you can scale to whomever and wherever you want within your network. Just depends on what your business needs are at the time. Absolutely. And I was just gonna say that, Kevin. A lot of our customers as best practice roll out in house first, and then they send the benefits onto their third party as well. There’s a lot of benefit that not only will in improve the BPO’s productivity and service levels, but it ultimately leads to a better customer experience. For your organization, is the capacity based on inbound slash outbound phone or back office too and back office workload requirements too, or is this mainly phones? Right now, it’s it’s mainly phones. There there’s always the opportunity to put that into more of our blended environments or include some of our our back office space. In all honesty, we we have such a great response right now with our phone queues. That that’s the our primary group that we’re targeting. So anybody else beyond that is probably a future state consideration. And I would say, just a quick plug for Intrigium, we do have also have a back office solution that really tracks productivity and does similar capabilities on the ability to do real time alerting and notifications to agents and, supervisors. So there was a question from Armando. How does IntraDiem differentiate between normal paid breaks and additional unpaid breaks? Well, the good news is we can create have you guys create unique exception codes. So anytime that’s plugged in via Intradio, you can allocate differently and see exactly how much time is being allocated by that. There is a question I’m gonna jump on from Britney asking about the the concept of flexible breaks with lunchtime and potentially any other unpaid time. One thing I’ll I’ll take an opportunity to plug, and and, Shannon, you may be speaking to us later in the presentation. So my apologies if I steal your thunder. This this idea, this this break thing we’ve been kinda talking about, this is not a standard offer from from our our partners are for automation at Intra Diem. We we thought of this concept. We deployed this concept with their partnership, and it’s something we’ve done because we thought it would be a cool thing. And so when you start thinking about could it be applied with lunches, could it be applied with other unpaid time, the answer is, sure. Why not? Automation isn’t limited by what’s in the box. It’s limited by your imagination and the tools you have available. So my answer would be, sure. Why not? The only thing I would tack on there is consult with your HR and legal departments just to make sure you’re still operating within the appropriate boundaries. I think we’re tied up. Okay. Excellent. Good deal. Alright. I know these are not very fancy slides, so I appreciate you guys bearing with me and just listening to me talk. But this is the the next one that we have. So this utilizes Intradium’s dynamic delivery function of where we can push content out to our staff. And so we going back to Kevin’s point, we kind of took that one step beyond of where Cigna’s moving to a little bit more of a personalized service where, we’re trying to keep one customer talking to one advocate or one agent so that they’re not being bounced around, you know, for some of those ongoing issues and having to repeat themselves over and over again. That naturally leads to the the need for callback time and for agents to follow back up with their customers. So we were we in talking with operations, we have one group where the agents were being scheduled for three twenty minute sessions of callback time per week. And operations came to us because they were getting feedback where the agents were not finding that time to be effective or they weren’t able to utilize it as well as they would have liked because they spend a majority of the time of that twenty minute chunk getting themselves caught up. Who do I need to call? Why do I need to call them back? What’s happening? And then they weren’t able to really use that time effectively. Or agents would just forget that it was even scheduled. It was even on their schedule because it would be moved around and optimized, you know, based off other needs of the contact center. So as part of this conversation, we’re trying to identify, can we give agents a larger chunk of time but make sure that we’re not pulling them off the phone when the house is burning? Answer to that is yes. So we pulled that prescheduled time out of the schedules and then started delivering through Intriddium, monitoring our queues, monitoring the agent states, making sure that we have that capacity, we started giving agents one forty five minute block of time per week to do these callback tasks. So we purposely went with a forty five minute block of time instead instead of the sixty minutes that they were previously getting per week. And we did that intentionally to help diagnose if the agents really needed that forty five minutes or if it was more I’m sorry. If they really needed that sixty minutes or if the sixty minutes was more a a symptom of the broken time. And, what we found is that agents love this. The the feedback of this honestly blew my mind. Just the immediate reception, the immediate response of this time is so much better that they that they can digest everything that needs to happen. They’re more productive. They’re able to get their queue cleared out, and nobody even really noticed that, cumulatively, they’re getting less time overall than they were. And I’m sure there’s this will probably be a question. I will call out that our work completion rate has stayed the same. That has not dipped at all, and so that speaks to the efficiency of the agents as well. And I think you said this was over a seven month period? Yep. Exactly. So this is what we’re looking at here. This is our pilot group of two hundred agents from March through December of last year. So if we didn’t do anything, if we just kept those three twenty minute chunks scheduled per week, that bottom bar is showing that we would have scheduled eighty six hundred hours. Wow. The top bar, right, That’s a seventy percent reduction of the time that the agents actually needed, which also blew my mind. I had the three I had had to triple check my numbers to make sure I was I was pulling this correctly. But this is a a great example of listening to your advocates and hearing them when they say, this isn’t working. Can we do something different? And it doesn’t always have to be a complete overhaul. I mean, this is a little change in the process, but the the results here speak for themselves of just they they don’t need they didn’t need as much time as what they thought they did. We just needed to give it to them in a little bit of a different manner to help them be more productive. You know, and Shannon, I’m gonna so much sorry. Go ahead, Kevin. No. I was just gonna pile on. And not to mention, we don’t schedule it anymore. I don’t have to have schedulers looking for pockets of time for these hundreds of people multiple times a week every week. And by the way, that can end up getting canceled by real time because the demand’s in the call center. We let Intra Diem do all of that work. We don’t have to do it. And it’s creating a better experience with better follow-up. So regardless, I wanted to throw that little nugget in there as well that it is delivering better value with a far less of an investment from the scheduling perspective. Yeah. And, you know, and I was just gonna add to that. You know, as as these guys talked about using dynamic delivery to do this callback, our customers leverage this for several different things. Computer based training is another big one. And the power of that as you see this efficiency gain is, you know, today’s world, if you have a computer based training scheduled for thirty minutes, if I’m a an agent, you know what? I’m taking thirty minutes in that because I’m not in any hurry to go get, a call because they’re probably not asking how my day is going. Right? And so with with this dynamic scheduling, when they go into training, that’s oh, that is when they the segment gets placed. So our customers on average see twenty to twenty five percent reduction in just that training time. Thirty minute sessions now taking twenty to twenty five minutes. It’s it’s pretty amazing. Mhmm. I do see a question about the integrations. One second. For Enter Dam, you mentioned these capabilities work for all ACDs, WFMs. Would this work if your ACD ACD system is cloud and WFM is on prem? Yes. Absolutely. It would. It it doesn’t matter which, and they can intertwine that way. Okay. From Britney, have you run into any issues where associates are not able to be able to do their callbacks because of volume or need? Or have all associates been able to use this option to do their callbacks? So here’s the cool part is we have not run into that challenge because we’ve eliminated a lot of that preplanned shrinkage that would other take otherwise take people off the phone. So that has not only reduced our shrinkage, of course, but it’s also put a put more agents on the phone just in general. And so we’re not pulling people off the phone constantly for this callback time that’s really not being used effectively. So I’m ultimately trying to answer your question here of we’ve created not only more capacity, or we have created more capacity that that allows this time to filter through because of the efficiencies gained. To be candid, I’m sure there probably will be some weeks that, are a little bit tougher, that are a little bit more heavy where we we just don’t have that capacity. To be honest, we haven’t run into that so far. So I’m not saying it’s never gonna happen, but that’s the really cool part about InterDEM is that it finds those pockets that a human can’t, and it reacts much quicker than anybody sitting there monitoring the systems can. So we’ve talked a lot about the agent efficiency gains and productivity improvements. There’s a question from Paul. Can you give a sense of how many WFM analyst hours you have saved because of these use cases? Oh, gosh. That is something that we track, but I don’t have that number up in front of me. Hold it, please. Let me let me see if I can pull that up quickly. It’s it’s in the thousands. I forgive me. I I wanna say probably, like, maybe fifteen to eighteen thousand. I’m sorry. Fifteen to eighteen hundred. Cool. That that was a a wrong statement. Fifteen to eighteen hundred hours, that we have I I will say we have not reduced our WFM headcount because of these efficiency savings. It allows those that savings time allows our staff to actually become the analysts that are in their titles. So they’re able to focus on, other more intensive tasks or other opportunities for identifying automation or identifying, outlier folks who who need attention as opposed to just sitting there and manually entering segments all day or manually sitting there and and watching our TA. So that’s a choice that Cigna made not to reduce our headcount, but instead reinvest that time in other opportunities or other areas that are better suited, for the analysts themselves. You often hear WFM are looked at as firefighters. You implement, introduce me to become fire preventers. One one good question here. What ultimately led you guys down this path of learning more about automation and Intradium in general and ultimately deciding to invest in that capability. Kevin. So I think we both can take a take a swack at this one, Shannon. So the the concept of automation and being able to empower more work with the same number of people is always appealing. Obviously, many of us are workforce management professionals. More with less is kind of our motto when it comes to how we do our work, and that’s really the the initial draw. And then you start talking about the the dollars and cents of it. I’m not gonna steal Larry’s thunder. There is significant ROI with the product for what it can return for the base use case. The things that IntraVeeam will sell, based upon, we’ll deliver value back to your organization. Everything that Shannon and and very lightly I have talked about, are things that we have done internal to our business to automate work we were doing that is adding value back to the product that is not in scope for the product. We have found creative uses for the solutions to deliver additional value for the organization. So the ROI of the product is one thing that’s that’s between your organizations and Larry and his team, but we are taking it and taking it to the next step by being creative with our application of of the the tool. So that’s my two cents. Shannon, what’s yours? Yeah. I’ll I’ll add on that of, I wanna I wanna make sure this doesn’t sound like a sales pitch because I’m not Intradiem employee. But the the partnership that we have with Intradiem is very solid, and they they absolutely are our partners along the way. And so the once the decision was made to implement IntraDjam for all the reasons that Kevin mentioned, For for some of your senior leaders, the ROI is definitely gonna be appealing for that. But once you have it in place, you know, IntraVeon has their their their prescribed or their recommended functionalities and use cases. Kevin mentioned earlier this the content that we’ve covered today is kinda taking it one step beyond, and the partnership with Intrigue gives us that flexibility to do that. They want to see us succeed as their customers, and so, we have a success manager manager that we very frequently bump a whole bunch of these ideas up against just to try to take advantage of all of the the possibilities that are out there because there’s not just because something is always done the way it is doesn’t mean it always has to continue to be done that way. I bungled that statement. That that is a there’s a much easier way to to say that, but, it’s it’s kind of a mindset change of getting into the mode of what else can we do differently, how else can we do this better. So I don’t know if that really answers the question, but that was kinda where where my line of thinking went, with making this decision. So it just opens up a whole lot of possibilities for us. Thanks, Shannon. So I’m just gonna do a quick time check. This has been amazing. Thank you, guys. Just a quick plug, as you guys are getting ready to, end this, Intradiem does these world tour events called forefront. What they are is a collaboration of contact center leaders that get together and really talk about some of the main issues they’re facing and how Intradiem can help solve those similar to what we heard from Shannon and Kevin today. As you see, we have two coming up. We’ll leave this on the site up just for a second to get the QR code. We have Forefront Atlanta, April twenty fourth, and we have Forefront San Francisco, May eighth. Again, these are collaborations of leaders and not just the in today I’m telling you how great it is. We we will have customers speaking at these as well. And then as far as additional questions, if we go forward one more slide, feel free to reach out to any three of us, via LinkedIn. We’ll leave this up for a second. So, again, any follow-up questions, feel free to to send to any of us. Any parting words, Kevin, Shannon? Really appreciate the questions. I I I I also appreciate Larry and Kevin for staying on top of those because I I was just seeing them fly by, and I really just appreciate the interaction and and everybody’s involvement. I’m I’m sure there probably are some questions that we did not ask. As Larry mentioned, please feel free to reach out to any of us. But, otherwise, I just really appreciate the attendance, and the involvement today. The interaction has been wonderful. Yeah. Mirror everything Shannon said, the only thing I would add on, and this is true for not only the InterDEM solution that we happen to deploy, but also many other of the solutions that we collectively as a workforce body of professionals use of ACDs, WFM tools, you name it. Creative application creative use of the application to maximize the dollars you’re spending in any of these platforms, is a critical part of what we should all be doing by what else asking the question of what else can we do, what else can it do for us. And, again, some of the examples here, you can crack into additional value, that otherwise would go unpacked. And, from a product perspective, again, this solution has worked well for us. I certainly encourage you guys to ask any questions you may have and appreciate the opportunities today. Alright, Vicky? Hi. Well, you guys had a jam packed time today, and you had tons of great information and lots of great questions. Thanks so much to the audience for participating today. Lots of great information. I’m not sure you did get to all the questions, and and, maybe we can get to those later on. But, I will be sending out a recording of this webinar along with the PDF of the slides. And so if somebody else in your organization needs to, check that out, if you wanna forward it on to them, or if you wanna go back and review it again, you’ll have an opportunity to do that with the recording. So is there anything else we need to do before we close today? I don’t think so. Just, again, thanks for everybody’s participation. It was great. Lots of q and a. Loved it. Shannon, Kevin, really appreciate hearing your story too. Thanks for giving us the opportunity there. Alright. Well, thanks everybody. Hope you have a great rest of your day. Thanks. Thanks, everyone. Take care. Bye. Intradiem, contact center automation designed by humans for humans.