Optum - Back-Office Customer Service Professional of the Year

Company: Optum, Eden Prairie, MN
Company Description: Optum is a health services and innovation company whose mission is to help people live healthier lives and to help make the health system better for everyone. At Optum, we design every experience by leveraging the voice of our customers and implement channel solutions which enhance and streamline the customer experience.
Nomination Category: Customer Service & Call Center Awards Individual Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Back-Office Customer Service Professional of the Year - Other Service Industries

Nomination Title: Cathy Sandlian

Cathy Sandlian is an employee supporting Optum for over sixteen years, working with automated outreach systems as a primary task. In 2018, she accepted responsibility for two legacy outreach systems from an acquired business to align them with Optum standard administration practices.

Cathy completely understands the impact that an outreach system has. It’s the electronic soul that bridges our businesses’ agents with our customers, connecting us together directly or by means of messaging, advising customers on how to reach us and why. With millions of people touched every month, great effort and expertise is required to ensure these outreach systems work as intended. They are only as effective as the data they receive and only powerful tools if leveraged with meaningful, consistent, and standardized thought and care. Leading that thought and care is Cathy’s passion.

Cathy’s initial discoveries while reviewing these acquired systems led to realization that they required reengineering. Cathy leveraged her experience and quickly redesigned structures, reporting, and documentation for both outreach systems, yielding streamlined, agile tools that eventually exceeded the needs of our customers. Cathy developed strong relationships with those she teamed with along the way; Businesses and Technology, Telecom and Operations, leaving them feeling truly supported.

The most impactful change for Cathy with these automated outreach systems, was accepting responsibility for code-based computer language (SQL/SSIS) data loading processes associated with legacy and our new outreach system OMNI. With only limited knowledge of computer language writing, programming and code, and no documentation of existing data loading processes to define flows and connections, Cathy began to learn the foundation of computer programming. She began to map, document, streamline and manage those loading processes while performing her existing system administration duties. In doing so, she quickly realized that there needed to be a standardized way to present data to OMNI, our newly acquired automated outreach system which began replacing our legacy systems. Using that programming knowledge, she created guidelines and structured processes to govern the quality of the data to be presented to OMNI for outreach, galvanizing the practice that only meaningful, accurate, and impactful data should ever reach the system for Member outreaches. Cathy foresaw the needs for data security and for automation, then learned about and pursued ownership of a server dedicated to new outreach system data loads. She began to structure automations for system ingest from multiple sources that met the standards she had created. She coded a Bad Phone number process based on her legacy “North American Numbering Plan Administrator” (NANPA) table structures and tailored it for the new outreach system. This references area code and prefix data as either new or non-existent and loads only meaningful, reachable phone number data for OMNI outreach attempts.

Cathy leveraged her fresh coding and computer language skills to unify her work, which is now termed the Genesys Outbound Load Data or GOLD Process. Each process averages ten tables for multiple tasks associated with record scrubbing, bad phone identification, staging, reporting, etc. Each process reports load volumes, failed loads, and other information back to each business. GOLD has loaded over 1,000,000 records for contact in 2020 with 6,000,000 records projected for 2021, and 14,000,000 for 2022 as migrations occur from legacy systems to OMNI. The thirteen currently active GOLD processes will easily grow to twenty by the end of second quarter, 2022, each mitigating risks of poor, incomplete and inaccurate data presentation to the OMNI system. These clean data load processes have contributed to raising Member Connect rates by four percentage points from 2020 to 2021.

As administration for OMNI continues post-migrations, Cathy created code-based skilling, campaign-calling prioritization algorithms to allow rapid changes to OMNI, giving businesses greater flexibility in changing outreach parameters to meet their goals. In doing this, she has fostered growth within her team, giving them new direction in a code-based system by sharing her knowledge with them. This team now manages outreach system administration, ticketing, requests, and data structures for legacy and OMNI systems. Cathy is always trying to find ways to improve any process she can under her umbrella of responsibility, while streamlining and saving time, effort, and money. She is the embodiment of Integrity, Innovation and Quality.

Cathy has received twenty-five company BRAVO! Awards since January 2020 as recognition for outstanding Collaboration, Performance, Relationships and Leadership qualities. Below are examples:

“Cathy has been instrumental in developing a standardized, repeatable process that will allow us to continue outbound dials as we move to the (OMNI) platform. Cathy stepped in, learned SQL, acquired the necessary equipment and knowledge to develop the GOLD process, which is now the Optum standard for loading records that enable lines of business to reach out to customers and deliver important information. After developing the initial process, Cathy has continued to look for steps that can be streamlined or automated. Cathy developed this process with a true omni channel end in mind as it can be leveraged for other proactive outreach modalities, such as text or email. Cathy is a hard worker and a self-starter. She recognized a gap that needed to be filled and went to work.”

“Cathy - thank you for your tireless efforts in getting the SQL SSIS packages created for the OptumCare NE Reliant efforts. Not only did you exceed timeline expectations, but you also assisted in improving the process for future (OMNI) Dialer launches. Your expertise and efforts are truly appreciated. Keep up the great work.”

“Moving the Quit for Life Program onto (OMNI) has been quite an undertaking and having you as our Dialer partner with so much knowledge and commitment to our team has been incredible and confidence building…”