An action research on reducing average handle time for medicare and retirement line of business in Optum

• Main Author: Salazar, Joshua Paul G.
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Animo Repository 2019
• Subjects: Call centers—Production standards; Medicare; Performance Management
• Online Access: https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/etd_masteral/6969
• Institution: De La Salle University

This action research aims to address reduce average handle time of call center agents within the line of business medicare and retirement which caters to medicare members enrolled in UnitedHealthcare, the largest healthcare, and insurance provider in the United States of America (“UnitedHealth Group,” 2019). As of the end of May 2019, average handle time is running at 1130 seconds vs. the target client target of 900 seconds. This results in additional overtime, hiring of extra headcount, calls not being answered, and callers wait for the queue for too long. Although we are aiming to reduce average handle time, we will also be monitoring our net promoter score. As of the month of May 2019, our NPS is running at 78. Improving NPS is outside the scope of this action research but we will be ensuring that NPS will not be compromised when reducing AHT. We will be aiming to retain our NPS of 78 vs. the target of 72. By doing root cause analysis, it is identified that failure to hit the target for average handle time is due to a knowledge gap, behavioral issues, lack of standard procedures, and manual non-value adding processes. This led to me to do this action research which was also the problem our vice president for operations wants me to do. During my first cycle, we were already able to implement operational action items that were low effort to implement but will yield high impact. This includes, setting thresholds on number of tries when doing outbound calls, targeted coaching and disciplinary actions on agents that belong to the 75th percentile in terms of hold and documentation time during a call, creation of process guidelines which agents placed on their work stations, designing the new hire training curriculum as well as conducting refresher training to agents that have knowledge gaps. In addition to the implemented action items, we are also in the process of developing a tool which will automate desktop navigation and getting of information from multiple sources. Development of the tool is expected to be completed by the end of August and user acceptance testing will be done on the 1st week of September.