All-In-One Functionality Provides Company Expanded Capacity and Support

About Custom Benefit Consultants, Inc

Custom Benefit Consultants, Inc. (CBC) is a leading provider of brokerage and consultative services benefit administration services, and contact center support and technology. Established in 1997, the company supports a diverse clientele of employer groups and individuals, affinity groups, and other service providers throughout the health insurance delivery system. They offer comprehensive benefits management solutions combined with today’s technology.

The Challenge

As a company Custom Benefit Consultants was expanding their operations both internally as well as with the number and type of clients they were acquiring. While moving forward, they realized the necessity of obtaining a communications system with expanded capacity and support for multiple interaction types – giving their customers increased choice and giving CBC a competitive advantage. Additionally, the company required a product that could easily record, report and quantify their interactions.

Previously, CBC had been using a hosted solution, for queued phone, email and chat. This option worked well in the company’s formative years, however, they soon outgrew its’ capabilities and scalability.

“Our previous hosted communications vendor was having some definite uptime issues, which was completely unacceptable,” said CBC CEO and President Robin Sylvia. “There were also some major issues with the reporting capabilities. In the beginning, they had the ability to outsource the reporting, and get the data, however that capacity was lost, and that really hurt us. The other major issue was that the CRM integration was not capable of accomplishing what we needed, given our growth.”

Ultimately, CBC needed a communications system that would fulfill the complex needs of the company, while allowing them to expand as desired.

The Solution

Working with Advanced Call Processing, a communications system reseller based in Carlsbad, California, CBC found the solution they were looking for with the Customer Interaction Center^® (CIC) from Interactive Intelligence. CIC is an all-in-one application suite that manages all interactions on one platform architected for SIP and voice over IP (VoIP).

"With CIC we don’t need multiple add-ons and we don’t have to worry about compatibility and integration issues.”

“What we really liked about CIC was, not only that it provided for all four interaction types (voice, email, web chat, and fax), but that it really minimized the hardware required, given the fact that the solution was a true, built from the ground up, all-in-one, software-based offering,” said Sylvia. “With CIC we don’t need multiple add-ons and we don’t have to worry about compatibility and integration issues.”

Prior to selecting ACP and ININ as their communications partner and solution, CBC was in a total hosted environment (phone, email, web, CRM) and outsourced all of their IT help (to InHouse IT). When the contract was signed, ACP was given 35 days to complete a simultaneous cut of the solution in their Rancho Santa Margarita, CA office and Las Vegas, NV office. The initial cutover included not only their corporate phone system, but also their contact center, which handles inbound calls, emails, text chats and faxes, along with queue callbacks, outbound calling and call recording. Due to unique routing requirements placed upon them by their customers, ACP built over 300 queues and applications for the cutover. ACP also installed two POE (Power over Ethernet) switches, and was their liaison to TelePacific (a new carrier for them) for their T1's. Prior to the cut, CBC stopped doing business with InHouseIT, and they had no technology person or IT staff or expertise. Driven by CBC's need to leave their Hosted environment, which also created a 'flash cut' scenario, this was an amazing effort that went remarkably well. Then, two weeks later, ACP moved their Rancho Santa Margarita office to their new corporate location in Lake Forest. After the move to Lake Forest, CBC quickly implemented their outbound dialing campaigns (via Interaction Dialer and the preview dialing application), which included a number of very creative applications, such as playing specific pre-recorded messages to prospects based upon company size. CBC also changed their recording application to go from a small % of calls, to the recording of all calls and interactions, plus scorecards.

Benefits

CIC has provided valuable operational benefits to CBC including improved recording capabilities and easier and more efficient outbound dialing functionality.

In the healthcare industry, it is imperative to have verification and validation of calls,

namely in the form of call recordings. With CBC’s previous hosted network they were only able to record a maximum of 40 percent of calls. That was simply not acceptable. CIC changed that percentage, and enabled the company to have reassured confidence in their information and documentation.

“One major benefit with CIC is that we are now recording 100% of the calls, and that has been critical,” said Sylvia. “We didn’t have that ability before, and since deploying CIC we have had a couple of situations that have made us grateful we have that essential functionality.”

CIC’s outbound dialer feature has also been extremely beneficial for CBC. It has allowed the company to save time and validate activity with their clients.

“We recently did 38,000 insurance renewals for Costco. We were able to load the information into CIC’s Interaction Dialer module and for the first time we could track all of the calls where we had made at least three attempts,” said Sylvia. “Previously we had been doing this all manually, which was not easy, efficient, or verifiable. Interaction Dialer is saving us time and is allowing us to easily and effectively report back to our clients. We plan to begin using it with our cold-calling and expect tremendous success with that.”

Not only has CBC benefited from the initial CIC implementation. But they are also able to look to the future with high expectations and confidence.