Case Study: Benenden Health Modernizes Service Delivery

The healthcare mutual boosts productivity and personalisation in award-winning digital transformation project with Sabio Group.

About Benenden Health

Founded in 1905 to help postal workers suffering from tuberculosis, Benenden Health is a not-for profit organisation now focused on offering an affordable alternative to health insurance for only £12.80 per person per month.

Benenden Health’s membership is growing, with an increase of almost 20,000 last year to some 867,400 members.

The organisation operates as a mutual run for its members, with each member paying the same price each month for access to services that include medical diagnostics and treatment, 24/7 GP and mental health helplines.

Member engagement grew strongly last year, with service provision up 22% on the previous year.

Activities included over 45,000 appointments for its 24/7 GP service and 7,500 calls with Benenden Health’s Mental Health Helpline.

The Challenge

Benenden Health acknowledges the challenges faced by the NHS and the need for affordable alternatives to private medical insurance.

There was a growing demand for the team to engage with members over a broader mix of channels.

The Benenden Health team recognised that it would also need to modernise its core business systems to make itself more efficient.

Any new customer contact infrastructure platform investment would need to ensure that it was able to link better with Benenden Health’s other systems, control data more efficiently, and make the whole engagement process easier for members.

The Solution

Benenden Health engaged Sabio Group to deploy a cloud-based solution based on the Genesys Cloud CX platform.

The Genesys Cloud solution helps to unify customer and agent experiences across phone, email, chat, text and social channels.

It plays a key role in assisting the healthcare provider with managing its member journey – connecting members to the right advisor on first contact, regardless of channel, while also helping to improve the employee experience for service delivery.

The Results

Since deploying its new Genesys Cloud platform, Benenden Health has freed itself from the operational limitations of its legacy telephony and workforce optimisation systems.

Managing the initial transition to a flexible cloud infrastructure has given the customer service team the agility it needed to progress the segmentation of its personal and business customers – unlocking the ability to unify data sets and support these different customer groups’ contact preferences.

• 8.8 / 10 for overall satisfaction & ease of use
• +20k new members in 2023
• 0.9 FTE time-saving with QA scorecard

The Challenge: Supporting Growth & Service Evolution

Benenden Health acknowledges the challenges faced by UK healthcare with the NHS under relentless pressure and waiting lists lengthening.

Cost of living rises and recent increases in inflation also place a growing emphasis on the need for affordable alternatives to private medical insurance.

Because of this, Benenden Health remains committed to making its healthcare product as affordable and easy to access as possible.

At the same time, Benenden Health’s customer service and contact centre team recognised the need to update its customer contact operations infrastructure to meet the requirements of its evolving demographic.

Traditionally membership was older, but with a growing corporate business and increased demand for private healthcare services, there was a growing demand for the team to engage with members over a broader mix of channels.

The Benenden Health team recognised that in addition to making its product and brand more applicable across the age range, it would also need to modernise its core business systems to make itself more efficient.

A key contact strategy goal was to continue adding value to the Benenden Health product offer and connect with people to make its service more accessible.

At the same time, the Benenden Health team needed to take account its role as a highly regulated organisation, with the requirement to adhere fully to FCA requirements.

A key part of this contact strategy was to recognise that organisations are collecting more information than ever before.

These conversations generate data that, when analysed and utilised properly, can provide valuable insights into customer preferences, satisfaction and overall experience.

Any new customer contact infrastructure platform investment would need to ensure that it was able to link better with Benenden Health’s other systems, control data more efficiently, and make the whole engagement process easier for members.

For example, digital technology has quickly become a key part of the Benenden Health experience, with over 100,000 members downloading an app that they can use to request diagnostics and treatment, book and participate in GP appointments, attend webinars and exercise classes, and download healthy recipes.

Benenden Health has continued to invest in modernising its systems, with a recent major roll-out of a new finance platform across the group.

These and other developments will integrate with the organisation’s new CX platform, capturing the data and insights that are essential for driving a richer, end-to end experience for customers.

The Solution & Sabio Brilliance: Deploying Cutting-Edge Cloud Architecture

As customer expectations continue to evolve, it’s vital that customer service teams collect the right customer data and use it accordingly.

In order to support the transition to a next-generation customer contact infrastructure, Benenden Health engaged Sabio Group, the global digital experience transformation services specialist, to deploy a cloud based solution based on the Genesys Cloud CX platform.

The Genesys Cloud solution helps to unify customer and agent experiences across phone, email, chat, text and social channels.

It plays a key role in assisting the healthcare provider with managing its member journey – connecting members to the right advisor on first contact, regardless of channel, while also helping to improve the employee experience for service delivery.

Working with Sabio, Benenden Health is taking advantage of the flexibility of Genesys Cloud to provide a single platform for its customer engagement, bringing together cloud and digital technologies to support every stage of the customer journey.

In addition to innovations such as SMS, screen-sharing and Workforce Engagement Platform, Benenden Health is also collecting information from across all channels – making it available to support both self-service and contact centre operations and unlocking the power of data that already exists within the business.

It’s also vital for Benenden Health to ensure effective QA monitoring, feedback and reporting, and it has been able to supplement its Genesys platform with the Scorebuddy QA scorecard system to accelerate and autoscore monitoring and share self-serve reporting and data in real-time to aid performance.

Automated version control and archiving helps the management of scorecard assessment and evaluation.

The effective use of the Scorebuddy QA scorecard has helped unlock a 0.9 FTE time-saving, with further improvements already scheduled.

The Outcome: Strong Foundations To Achieve Bold Ambitions

Since deploying its new Genesys Cloud platform, Benenden Health has freed itself from the operational limitations of its legacy telephony and workforce optimisation systems.

Managing the initial transition to a flexible cloud infrastructure has given the customer service team the agility it needed to progress the segmentation of its personal and business customers – unlocking the ability to unify data sets and support these different customer groups’ contact preferences.

Business Results

From a business perspective, the transition to a cloud solution has seen a move from increasingly expensive and limited legacy systems to a cloud solution that could deliver Benenden Health’s blueprint for change.

The Genesys platform operates as an all-in-one, API-first solution that supports the integration of a wide range of systems and components both from within the Benenden Health group and as additional tools from the Genesys partner ecosystem.

Customer Experience

Benenden Health’s investment in its next-generation cloud systems is translating directly into a better experience for members.

Last year saw consistent scores of over 8.8/10 from members for both overall satisfaction and how easy Benenden Health was to engage with.

Having the Genesys Cloud platform in place has been at the heart of this, serving as the central hub for collecting and managing customer interaction data, whether that’s through the core telephony, or new digital initiatives such as the Benenden Health app that will combine chatbot and AI technology within the app to support benefit requests.

Any escalation requirements are fed to the Genesys platform as a request from the app. Customers are also able to take advantage of new features such as queue callback, helping to resolve the frustrations that customers feel when they have to wait, or proactive outreach with SMS confirmations – removing the need for customers to get in touch in the first place.

Colleague Experience

A key goal behind Benenden Health’s next-generation contact strategy has been to improve the customer journey – and that’s created a significant positive impact for advisors supporting members.

Removing specific frustrations – for example, by opening up access to historical records through the creation of a custom UI – gives advisors more time to focus on handling more complex member enquiries.

The introduction of skills-based routing is also connecting members to the right advisors on first contact, helping put their expertise to work and delivering increased satisfaction for members.

Operational Effectiveness

Bringing data streams together in the core Genesys Cloud infrastructure has played a key role in improving performance and operational effectiveness for Benenden.

For example, Benenden is working to integrate its Genesys customer service platform with systems at the Benenden Hospital – the first time that both the society and its hospital have been able to share data between two critical parts of the group – facilitating member coverage and also ensuring more integrated support for the end-to-end CX journey. This will open the door for a huge range of integration opportunities.

Benenden’s important Contact Strategy project has delivered against its key objectives – successfully transitioning member contact services to a more flexible, future-proof cloud infrastructure in under six months with no disruption to the group’s operations.

Delivering this blueprint for change has also secured improvements in terms of the member experience, operational productivity and reducing cost to serve, and also in terms of equipping advisors with a much more intuitive and informed UI that brings all data into a single interface – helping them to resolve member queries more effectively.

“It’s this consistent access to the right data and insights that’s helping us to deliver an improved performance for members – while also helping us to make informed choices when it comes to considering future changes and what’s going to have the best impact for the business.” David Spencer, Senior Project Manager

According to Benenden Health’s Senior Project Manager, David Spencer: “…working with a specialist CX partner like Sabio has also given us the insights needed to optimise our Genesys Cloud deployment.

“Innovations such as the Benenden Health App and our chatbot will help to grow our self-service capabilities.

“But these interactions are fully integrated with our core Genesys platform so that our advisors always have visibility of the full, end-to-end member journey.

“It’s this consistent access to the right data and insights that’s helping us to deliver an improved performance for members – while also helping us to make informed choices when it comes to considering future changes and what’s going to have the best impact for the business.”

What’s clear is that, with 73% of new consumer members coming through digital channels over the last year, Benenden Health now has a cloud CX strategy in place to help grow its digital capabilities, take advantage of the insights available through its data, and provide members with more choice when it comes to engagement.

About Sabio

Sabio Group is a global digital customer experience (CX) transformation specialist with major operations in the UK (England and Scotland), Spain, France, Netherlands, Malaysia, Singapore, South Africa and India. Through its own technology, and that of world-class technology leaders such as Amazon Connect, Avaya, Genesys, Google Cloud, Salesforce, Twilio and Verint, Sabio helps organisations optimise their customer journeys by making better decisions across their multiple contact channels.

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Call Centre Helper is not responsible for the content of these guest blog posts. The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect those of Call Centre Helper.