Understand every voice: How to use XM in health insurance contact centers

Health insurers are eager for greater insight into how members feel when they call, live chat, or text. Capturing far more than the words can unlock a treasure trove of actionable insights and information. At Qualtrics we know the importance of tone, speed, sentiment, and volume in adding depth and reliability to linguistic data.

What is speech analytics?

In a nutshell, speech analytics is technology that analyzes and makes sense of both the words someone uses when they call or chat, and the sentiment and intensity behind the words.

Calls to health insurance provider call centers are often centered around two main topics:

1. How to get the right healthcare coverage - choosing plans, providers, etc.
2. Paying for health care (coverage, payments, deductibles, networks, etc.).

The importance of listening

Both high-level topics are deeply emotional and require careful and often detailed customer care interactions. Calm communication is critical to health insurance care (whether in chat or call center) because it increases the likelihood that the member both listens to and absorbs, the information provided.

Knowing how a customer feels with certain responses or in certain situations can help the customer care team create an interaction flow that is both efficient and delivers an exceptional experience, from live chat to call centers.

This ability to continuously identify pain points, sentiment, and intensity enables prioritized actions to figure those painful interactions out and proactively prevent them. Proactive excellent service saves money on AHT, lowers callbacks, and improves loyalty.

How can speech analytics help?

Let’s say a member is calling about a claim. Leveraging speech analytics during a call can highlight moments of particular frustration (faster speech, louder volume, particular word choice), or what types of responses yield calm (evenly paced, lower volume, etc.).

Unpacking coinsurance and deductibles is complicated, and speech analytics can help identify the moments when particular phrasing is needed.

Perhaps members get immediately frustrated when words like coinsurance are used, so the team could be coached to define it, or explain it, not just use the word. An extra 15-second explanation isn’t inexpensive at scale, but when it prevents additional calls and enables on-time claims payments, it quickly becomes beneficial.

For health insurance organizations, ensuring information is not just communicated clearly, but heard accurately, has a powerful impact on member health, provider satisfaction and word of mouth, operational efficiencies, and even unlocking blue-sky opportunities around expectations. 

The importance of taking action

We believe in business actioning. With our differentiated focus and ability to deliver on business impact, recognized by Gartner and Forrester, our approach to speech analytics is to not just identify sentiment, but help health insurers know what to do to address the negative sentiments.

We can put sentiment at moments into context with the entire customer journey and seamlessly integrate the speech analytics insights into our analytics engine. Here the sentiment can be put into conversation with operational metrics, enabling the organization to see not only what upsets customers but what impacts operational KPIs, from call time to renewals.

Pulling speech analytics data into the engine also ensures actions are a part of the process; everything from tickets to action plans are seamlessly triggered and integrated into company workflows. Larger challenges can be combined with operational metrics to uncover both.

So your member voices will be heard, understood, and influence prioritized actions to address them. We can put sentiment at moments into context with the entire customer journey.

Hear every voice

In health insurance, keeping communication clear, calm and impactful drives down repeat calls and drives up satisfaction. Leveraging speech analytics to get clear insight around what triggers negative sentiment, and how intensely can identify key moments to improve.

Tying that data seamlessly into operational metric and automating actions based on it, ensure your organization can leverage the members’ voices to continually improve the experience.