Wausau Benefits Insures The Highest Level Of Customer Service With Jacada

Company Overview:
Wausau Benefits provides a single source for employee benefit plan administration, including health, dental, short-term and long-term disability claims. It serves more than 2.7 million enrollees of more than 400 self-funded companies ranging from 200 employees to large, national accounts. The Claim Services operation processes more than 12 million claims a year.

The Business Challenge:
Wausau Benefits' customer service philosophy sets them apart from other plan administrators.

"At Wausau Benefits, our claim service representatives (CSRs) process claims and take customer service calls. We do not split the two functions because by doing so, we provide, in our opinion, a much higher level of service than our competitors. The individual who processes your claim is the same person you talk to on the phone. He or she knows your claim information and can answer your questions faster and more fully," explains Pat McKee, director of corporate operations.

Unfortunately, the representatives were faced with several non-integrated applications in order to handle the claims processing and customer service functions. Not only were the user interfaces challenging to learn and use—"These were green screens filled with stuff that, quite frankly, I did not understand after seven years of being here," McKee admits—the applications also required redundant data entry in order to process information from a single customer call, due to the lack of integration.

According to McKee, "There had been discussions on whether or not we should separate the claims processing and customer service functions because of the steep training curve. We did not want to do that, strategically."

In addition to needing to decrease the training time for their representatives, Wausau Benefits wanted to modernize their applications to portray more of a "high-tech" image to prospective and existing customers.

"Typically, when a customer comes in to take a look at what we can offer them, they want to see a demonstration of our system," says McKee. "We found that some customers and prospects were reluctant to do business with us because our systems appeared antiquated. We wanted to put that notion to rest and show them we have state-of-the-art applications."

First and foremost, however, was Wausau Benefits objective to increase productivity in an effort to lower their operational costs; they were looking to grow their business without having to add staff.

The Jacada Solution
After a comprehensive evaluation of several options, Wausau Benefits decided that Jacada offered them the most effective way to meet their needs.

"Jacada's solution was more efficient than other products we looked at, and very capable at passing data from one application screen to another, eliminating redundant keying. We had a lot of that," explains McKee.

Wausau Benefits CSRs use several different tools to do their jobs. Jacada provided a streamlined interaction for the primary application that the CSRs use to provide customer service and pay claims. In addition, they have a computer telephony integration (CTI) interface with the Jacada application.

All of Wausau Benefits claims are stored electronically through an OCR/ICR process. With the Jacada application, Wausau was able to simplify and automate a process that pulls the claim control number from these electronic claims, inputs the control number into the customer service application, and brings up a copy of the claim for the CSR's reference.

"We were able to integrate a whole host of applications that sit on the CSR's desktop, and that really boosted productivity," McKee confirms.

In fact, they achieved a 4% increase in productivity within the first year, as measured in terms of the number of transactions—processing a claim or handling a call— that each CSR can perform in a day. That means the company can serve more customers with more product lines without having to add staff. For Wausau Benefits, the 4% productivity increase represents a saving of around $400,000, making the Jacada solution an investment that paid for itself in less than a year.

"One of our guiding principals is that, with any strategic development, we have to see a return on our investment in 12 months or less, which we did with Jacada," says McKee. "But beyond that, I have projected our return on the Jacada project over five years, and I believe we will be in the $2.7 million range."

Another benefit of the Jacada integration project was an improvement in quality and a reduction in errors.

"In our industry, as I'm sure is true in most, one bad keystroke, one misplaced decimal point, can mean the difference between right and wrong. By capturing information from one screen and automatically passing it to subsequent screens without re-keying, we were able to improve accuracy and standardize a lot of what we do," McKee relates.

Wausau Benefits has also received very good feedback from their customers, both current and prospective, on their new "high-tech" image.

McKee explains that Wausau Benefits is a very high-touch company. When they bring their customers and prospective customers in, they sit them down with one of the CSRs who is actually doing the job, so that the customer gets to see exactly what it is that the CSR does each day.

"The philosophy behind it is 'what you see is what you get,' both our people and our systems," says McKee. "But our customers are people who have grown up in a point-and-click world, and that's what they expect. Before Jacada, when we'd show them an old-fashioned application, it was more difficult to build their confidence that we could accurately process 100,000 claims for them a year. Now they see what we're doing, and they can relate to it, and they feel comfortable that we can deliver on what we say we're going to do."

Summary:
With the Jacada solution, Wausau Benefits was able to tailor their customer service systems to support their strategic business model, instead of having to abandon their competitive service advantage due to the limitations of those systems. In addition, Wausau Benefits is now positioned to grow their business without having to add CSRs in order to maintain the highest service levels. Further, in on-site visits, their customers and prospective customers now see a high-tech, industry leading service organization, which inspires confidence and helps Wausau Benefits gain additional business. Another benefit of the Jacada integration project was an improvement in quality through eliminating error-prone redundant data entry.

The Jacada project paid for itself in the first year, as Wausau Benefits realized a 4% percent increase in productivity, representing an operational savings of about $400,000. Based on these early returns, Wausau Benefits has projected that their five-year return on the project will be in the $2.7 million range.

"Jacada was really committed to our success with this project, and we're extremely pleased with the results. We are looking forward to working with Jacada on the next step, which is to more effectively integrate our customer set-up process on the front end with our claims processing and customer service functions," McKee concludes.