We’re all consumers of health insurance, and we’ve all gone through open enrollment. Every year we face a limited window in which we have to review options and make selections for the coming year. I don’t know about you, but I’m perpetually busy. And, truth be told, this tends to be a task I push out to the last minute. So, like so many others, I end up scrambling to get questions answered so I can complete my selections. To get answers, I pick up the phone and dial the toll-free number for my current or prospective health insurer.
This is a make it or break it moment in terms of my relationship with my health insurance provider. If the published number does not connect, was no longer valid, or worse of all connected to a completely different company, I would not be pleased. And as my colleagues can tell you, you don’t want to poke the bear.
Monumental Manual Process
If you are like most health insurance companies, you have hundreds of toll-free numbers. Keeping track of them and their current status can be a difficult task. During most of the year many of those numbers may get limited use. But when call volume spikes for the couple of months of open enrollment, they all need to work and work correctly.
Many health insurance companies attempt to validate their toll-free numbers by having employees manually dial in just prior to the start of open enrollment. This is terribly inefficient, and generally doesn’t get to all the numbers. It is also slow and highly error prone.
One large Cyara healthcare customer recently talked about the difficulties of even doing a manual inventory of all of their toll-free numbers. “We have thousands of toll free numbers we have collected through growth, acquisitions and program changes, and we have no idea where they all point or if they all work.” the Telecom Director said. “To try to test the numbers all manually would take 2 people a whole week of just dialing and we just don’t have that kind of time with everything else we need to get ready for open enrollment.”
“To try to test the numbers all manually would take 2 people a whole week of just dialing numbers and we just don’t have that kind of time with everything else we need to get ready for open enrollment.”
Telecom Director
Large Managed Health Insurance Provider
Just dialing the numbers and making sure they connect to the correct company doesn’t even address all of the issues. With a large inventory of toll free numbers, there also needs to be a validation that the opening message to the consumer matches the program, or company division, that they are contracted with. With the frequent and rapid changes in healthcare these days, ensuring the accuracy of this information can take even more time than validating that the numbers themselves are connecting. Doing this type of validation manually can require multiple calls into the same number with the caller paying very close attention to each open prompt or even recording the calls.
Automating the Process
Cyara serves 4 of the top 5 health insurance companies in the US. We understand the importance of open enrollment to both our clients and their end-consumers. Moreover, we are in the business of automatically generating calls. And through automation, testing all of those toll-free numbers is very straightforward.
Contact Cyara today to get started.
