Delta Dental of Minnesota Improves First Contact Resolution by 20%

↑20%

First Contact Resolution

↓40

Six Sigma defect rate

↓40

Customer and agent effort

↑

Customer and agent satisfaction

At a Glance

Company Delta Dental

Industry Insurance

Region U.S.

Products Used Calabrio ONE Suite

About Delta Dental

As one of the largest providers of dental benefits in the Upper Midwest, Delta Dental of Minnesota serves 9,100 Minnesota- and North Dakota-based purchasing groups and 4.3 million members nationwide. Delta Dental of Minnesota is headquartered in Minneapolis.

CONTACT SALES TEAM

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Combining Speech Analytics with Six Sigma improves FCR and nearly halves customer/agent effort.

Challenge

Delta Dental of Minnesota’s unwavering commitment to customer satisfaction really sets it apart from other providers: despite boasting a customer satisfaction rate of 98%, Delta Dental continually looks for new ways to raise that number even higher.

That’s why — after opening a new operations center and deploying the Calabrio ONE Suite — Delta Dental wanted to understand why some interactions led to negative member experiences and high effort by both members and agents. In this way, they could grow customer loyalty and employee engagement by increasing first contact resolution (FCR) while decreasing the “defect” rate as defined by Delta Dental’s Lean Six Sigma approach to continuous improvement.

Solution

To identify what caused most of the high effort and dissatisfaction experienced by customers, leaders paired Calabrio Speech Analytics with Delta Dental’s Six Sigma approach to continuous improvement.

Following a disciplined, five-step process, leaders identified 29 opportunities for improvement within a total of 117 calls from members who were truly dissatisfied. But when they realized only four issues — assistance finding a dentist, inquiries about dental treatment, questions about dental insurance benefits and confusion regarding the claims process — represented 60% of all dissatisfied calls and high effort, leaders knew they could make quick, significant FCR and satisfaction improvements by focusing on those issues first.

In order to further increase FCR, leaders also modified the training required for Delta Dental Customer Service Agents and adjusted the quality review evaluation form to further emphasize the specific behaviors they wanted agents to model. Additionally, they designed a new, Calabrio Speech Analytics-powered dashboard that displays up-to-date FCR metrics, so both agents and leaders can proactively monitor progress against goals.

Lastly, they changed the design of the interactive voice response (IVR) system, then conducted more outreach and education for providers and more training for agents.

We expect throughout the remainder of the year to continue to reduce our defect rate by 40%, which will drive additional improvement in first contact resolution.”

Rich DeMarco –
Chief Operating Officer
Delta Dental

Result

By successfully integrating Calabrio Speech Analytics into its Six Sigma framework, Delta Dental of Minnesota improved FCR by 20%
while shrinking customer/agent effort and the Six Sigma defect rate by 40% each.