Aspect One Article - How to Win an Award by NOT Serving Your Customers

McDonald's might boast of having served more than 10 gazillion customers, but has it ever received an award for not serving the burger and fries fast-food crowd?

Making customers happy by not serving them -- now that would be pretty amazing.

Health Net is among the largest publicly traded managed healthcare companies in the United States. It provides health benefits through its subsidiaries to about 6.4 million people in 27 states and the District of Columbia.

When Health Net began looking for a voice portal that would help its customers self serve AND ensure their satisfaction with the process, it turned to Aspect Software for a solution.

Health Net's use of Aspect® Customer Self Service™ with speech recognition and text-to-speech applications helped it earn Speech Technology Magazine's Most Innovative Solution Award for 2006 and CRM Magazine's 2006 Service Elite Award.

Those awards recognized the key results of Health Net's implementation of the Aspect voice portal, which included the following:

Because Health Net wanted to be sure that the self-service solution it chose would deliver the same satisfactory level of service as its customer service representatives, the company instigated a careful and methodical process to making a decision that it knew would have long-term results.

Accomplishing this takes more than a few voice prompts and a touch-tone menu. Health Net knew this and investigated the advanced capabilities of Aspect Customer Self Service, including automatic speech recognition, integration with customer databases and fax-back.

It found that if a caller wanted to check and see if a claim had been paid, for instance, he or she could be prompted to speak the date of the claim, which would lead the system to query the database to find out whether Health Net had made the payment and how much it had paid. The system could then deliver the information by playing a recording or automatically sending a fax to the customer.

To provide a level of privacy that complied with HIPAA, Health Net discovered that it could utilize one of the more innovative features of Aspect Customer Self Service -- voiceprint identification. After members recorded a voiceprint initially, the system could identify them positively any time they called.

Now that Health Net knew a lot about what the voice portal could do, it set about determining which functions might still be better performed by customer service representatives. The contact center staff composed a list of the most frequent requests from callers and studied the way representatives handled them. Was it possible to accomplish the same transactions effectively using automation?

They performed pilot tests with actual Health Net customers to see if their assumptions were accurate.

Health Net team members listened as customers interacted with the automated system, looking for indications of caller frustration. Managers also gathered information from service representatives who fielded calls after users opted to speak with an agent.

Health Net would use all of this information to configure and refine the system to meet its unique business needs -- and win two prestigious awards.

"Aspect Software respects me as a client and Health Net as a business," said Jean Sandler, Health Net's director of Systems Support. "They understand our requirements and will go the extra mile to get us what we need. And they have an outstanding product."