The 2017 Speech Industry Implementation Awards: State Collection Service

Customer: State Collection Service

Vendor: CallMiner

Product: CallMiner EurekaLive

State Collection Service, a family-owned accounts receivable and collection service for healthcare providers, was founded in 1949. In the six decades since, it has established itself as a leader in debt services. It is based in Madison, Wis., and operates four locations staffed by hundreds of employees.

As with any collection agency, State Collection Service relies on strong training for workers to help them provide the best consultative service with consumers who are behind on their payments. Speech analytics is a big part of that effort.

“State Collection initially monitored call quality by physically reviewing a handful of recorded calls for each representative on a monthly basis, seeking ways to improve training and call results,” says Tracy Dudek, vice president of operations.

In response to consumer protection rules that regulate how collection calls can be handled and to enhance its own business, State Collection Service sought out software that would enable it to record and review calls automatically. It eventually selected CallMiner’s Eureka, which provided post-call transcriptions and reports. Eureka, which provided speech analytics on 100 percent of calls, also came with a 12- to 24-hour lag in results.

So as State Collection continued to grow, it started looking for a way to improve the outcome of the calls while agents were still on the phone. It upgraded to CallMiner’s EurekaLive, which monitors in-progress calls for the presence or absence of specific language or acoustic characteristics, in January.

EurekaLive tracks script elements as they are completed using contextual speech patterns and alerts agents of key events and changing acoustic sentiment to ensure that agents are saying the right things at the right time with next-best-action guidance, event alerting, and automated context-driven workflow reminders delivered directly to them.

EurekaLive breaks down conversations into three- to five-second snippets and will remind agents when needed to seek “permissive phone numbers” (regulations forbid agents from calling cell phones, for example, without express permission), courtesy language, and helpful hints for successful call resolution.

Supervisors can monitor agents in real time as well. EurekaLive’s command post enables supervisors and quality analysts to review every call in progress for their respective teams. Key call events, such as escalation attempts, compliance concerns, and negotiation opportunities, are highlighted; conversations that require the most attention are automatically prioritized. Supervisors can drill into any ongoing call and review individual alerts and the words or acoustic characteristics that triggered them.

“Not only has [EurekaLive] proven a major competitive advantage for us, it has increased compliance on calls while also increasing overall patient satisfaction,” Dudek says. “EurekaLive allows us to provide our staff with real-time analysis on calls, further enhancing our desire for increased patient satisfaction and first-call resolution for patients. In addition, we have been able to continue creating topic-specific scripting within EurekaLive.”

EurekaLive has helped State Collection Service create more than 200 scripts for unique scenarios, but perhaps the greatest benefit has been the increased amount of positive language that is being used by agents, customers, and supervisors during calls. Customer compliments, for example, are up 114 percent.

“EurekaLive has enhanced our marketing effort by providing an increased competitive advantage in the area of patient satisfaction and improved patient experience,” Dudek adds. “In fact, State Collection Service can attribute a high interest in the area of improved patient satisfaction from its client base. We are partnering with healthcare providers to continually enhance the provider’s reputation with the patient through a positive experience with our contact center.”

In the future, State Collection Service expects to expand its use of CallMiner’s EurekaLive to incorporate surveys to further enhance the agency’s collection performance.

The Results

Since implementing CallMiner EurekaLive in its contact centers, State Collection Service has seen the following results:

• a 17.5 percent decrease in risk language;

• a 21 percent decrease in dissatisfaction language;

• a 114 percent increase in customer compliment language;

• an 11.2 percent decrease in consumers asking for a callback;

• a 26.4 percent increase in proper insurance language;

• a 48.9 percent increase in regulatory disclosure language; and

• an increase in proper patient identification on calls to 98.95 percent, compared to 94.12 percent in the fourth quarter of 2016.