CUSTOMER PROFILE
Maxicare is a pioneer in the health maintenance organization (HMO) industry in the Philippines. With locations nationwide, Maxicare aims to assist patients in living their best possible lives. A long-time NICE partner, Maxicare was struggling to fully leverage the NICE Workforce Management (WFM) platform and get the most out of the tool. The company engaged NICE Value Realization Services (VRS) to understand how to better maximize their use of WFM. Ultimately, the engagement improved both customer and agent experience and has opened up new opportunities for Maxicare in the future.
01 The Before
Siloed Operations and Missed Potential
Founded in 1987, Maxicare is a pioneer in the health maintenance organization (HMO) industry in the Philippines. With locations nationwide, Maxicare aims to assist patients in living their best possible lives. The company’s contact centers play a key role in this mission. Agents at the contact centers provide support through voice and non-voice channels and leverage a holistic model that combines frontline agent support and doctor online services.
Charisse D. Leonardo, Senior Manager of Contact Center at Maxicare, said the company has worked with NICE’s WFM for years. However, the organization had heavily siloed operations and the team struggled to fully tap into the features the platform offers. “The internal team had been trained on WFM, but it was a challenge to really maximize the potential of the solution,” she said. Maxicare works with several BPO partners who previously led their own individual processes, leading to further disconnection across the team.
02 Desire to Change
Guidance on Maximizing the Tools in Place
The Maxicare team wanted to turn things around and build a more structured contact center. Maxicare was already using WFM to forecast and generate schedules for all BPO partners but needed a more intentional approach. “We wanted to maximize usage of WFM, improve forecasting, fully utilize scheduling module from manual scheduling to automated, and monitor real-time agent activities,” Charisse Leonardo said. The team connected with their NICE contacts about tips for better leveraging the tools they had in place.
In 2022, NICE VRS offered guidance to the Maxicare team about where gaps could be bridged and suggested tools to implement. This short engagement showed Maxicare where quick wins could be had and drove Maxicare leadership to expand the relationship with VRS. “We needed guidance on how to best use the tool, and VRS helped with that,” Charisse Leonardo said.
03 The Solution
Change Management Smooths the Path Ahead
In 2023, Maxicare started a full Command Center Operations engagement with NICE VRS Managed Services. This project provided WFM administration, forecasting and scheduling, and high-level, real-time management with VRS consulting. The overarching goals of the program were to guide Maxicare in upleveling their contact center operations, maximize usage of WFM across BPO partners, move from manual scheduling to automated, and monitor real-time agent activities. NICE VRS worked hand in hand with Maxicare so that the team would feel ready to run things on their own at the end of the engagement.
Together, VRS and Maxicare created an Operations and WFM Transition plan that focused on proper onboarding of Managed Services, creation of and introduction of the Managed Services team to BPO partners, restructuring of WFM business processes and governance and change management best practices. “Change management was the key driver in user adoption,” Charisse Leonardo said.
The implementation process leaned on communication from senior leadership to the contact center team and BPO partners to secure buy-in. Additionally, VRS led ‘Train the Trainer’ sessions for the internal team and BPO partners, which included creating a workbook of best practices for tailor-fitting WFM usage to individual teams.
04 The Results
Eliminating Overscheduling and Reducing Call Handle Time
Maxicare’s contact center and approach are unique due to the complexity of their stakeholders: doctors and providers are a portion of their audience, as are general patients. The VRS partnership improved metrics for these differing stakeholders, and both internal challenges and profit goals are now better managed.
Thanks to real-time monitoring, Maxicare has decreased response time and reduced abandoned calls. Customer satisfaction is now above 90%. Average handle time per call has dramatically improved; Maxicare well exceeded its target of a 21-minute average, locking in an average of 14.5 minutes. Forecasting accuracy has improved by 10%, reducing overscheduling and cutting costs in the process.
Feedback from supervisors has been positive; as agents have gotten more insight and access into their schedules, the burden has been reduced on leadership. Management has also been pleased with the improvements in handling data and feels they have more time for appropriate coaching with agents.
One important KPI for the team was agent schedule adherence, a metric that Maxicare was not previously tracking or had access to. Since the project started, adherence performance has climbed to 90.88%. Maxicare plans to roll out this metric to all BPO partners soon, too.
05 The Future
Integrating Non-Voice Channels
Looking ahead, Maxicare has plans to implement new KPIs into the statement of work for all BPO partners. This includes switching to a productive hours billing model, which will result in significant cost savings for Maxicare. Additionally, average handling time will become part of a quarterly review process, and the company is looking for further ways to simplify the forecasting process.
As voice channels were the focus of this initial project, Maxicare now plans to integrate all other channels and further measure the performance of agents, as well as integrating all non-voice channels to further improve the customer experience. There are many opportunities ahead for Maxicare as they continue to tap the full power of WFM.
