UPMC Health Plan, Pittsburgh, PA, United States: UPMC Medicare Sales Telesales Team of the Year

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The University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC) is a $24 billion health care provider and insurer. As the largest nongovernmental employer in Pennsylvania, the company supports more than 92,000 employees, 40 hospitals, 800 doctors’ offices, and a 4-million-member Insurance Services Division. 

UPMC for Life Telesales team is responsible for membership growth and providing the critical first impression of our plan to the public. We do this by helping potential members learn more about Medicare, types of Medicare Plans, and the UPMC for Life plan options. The telesales team is comprised of licensed representatives with all of our calls are recorded and maintained for 10 years.    

We have developed many strategies and tactics to meet our sales and service goals while striving to provide the best service to prospective members.  Our triage strategy ensures that we assist callers in the most effective and efficient way.  This allows us to route calls to the most appropriate representative. The core team which is highly trained and incentivized receive more challenging calls, while temporary representatives assist with basic requests and questions from callers.  

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Because of federally mandated seasonality, our 2022 inbound volume between periods varied from an average of 2,700 calls to over 19,700 per month.  Well over a 400% increase.  As a result, scalability was an essential part of our success in 2022.  To meet these radical changes in volume, additional resources are deployed.  This, tied with triage strategy allowed us to achieve scalability without sacrificing quality or service to our caller.      

We used marketing to target prospective customers using predictive response models.  During the open enrollment period, multiple response options were used with strong emphasis for phone engagement during the pandemic.  Due to the limited window of opportunity, the timing, frequency, and quantities can be aggressive with millions of marketing pieces mailed and tens of thousands of leads to be generated.

With a large inventory of unique toll-free numbers, we were able to achieve precise tracking of responses real-time and route calls to specific groups of agents and crease customized customer experiences.  The latter enabled us to specialize and increase productivity of our agent teams.    
To increase contact rates, we developed marketing pieces personalized for each telesales representative including tailored message, their business card and direct phone number.   

Central to meeting our strategic objectives is the aggressive leveraging of technology.  By partnering with our CRM team, we have been able to create new interfaces with our telephony system to track marketing campaigns, route leads to the applicable sale team and is where we document our engagement with customers.  

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Our sales results have been proven with our over-the-phone sales producing over 80% of our total sales results and consistently exceeding assigned sales targets during the year.  These achievements contributed to UPMC for Life’s revenue and increase in membership.   We serviced over 69,000 calls. Federal standards mandate a service level greater than 80% and an abandonment rate less than 5%.  We achieved an average service level of 93.58%, and an abandonment rate of 1.47%.  Every day we leverage our passion and innovation drive sales and service results!

Please see slide #3 in our supporting documentation for statistics about peak demands and exceeding expectations. 
Please see slide #4 in our supporting documentation for a glimpse at our year-round Inside Sales Team
Please see slide #5 in our supporting documentation for statistics on increasing production from our seasonal staff and scalability.
Please see slide #6 in our supporting documentation for statistics showing the sales production of our Special Needs Plan for our seasonal staff members.

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We created tools to streamline our handle time per lead and increase productivity while making outbound calls and scheduling follow-up appointments. It also provides management with a real-time view of the team’s book of business. 

We have also created functionality for a sales representative to route leads to a dedicated unit.  This seamlessly enables the transfer of work between teams empowering us to leverage our scalability to ensure that all leads are worked in accordance with department standards.  

As a telesales unit, well over 80% of our sales come from enrollments over the phone.  We partnered with our CRM team to enhance our telephonic enrollment module utilizing dynamic scripting based on customer’s personal information, responses during the call enabling us to maintain compliance in a tightly regulated environment and utilize scalable staffing with minimal training required.   

In 2022, we instituted new sales initiative for the team. New phone routing and the use of a phone dialing system allowed us to have our year-round staff focused on inbound calls, while having the majority of our seasonal staff focused on outbound calls. These calls were specific to our UPMC for Life Complete Care plan which is a special needs plan that requires beneficiaries to be on both Medicare and have full Medical Assistance. This population requires a lot of time, patience, and care in order to get them set-up. Because we had this group focused solely on this area, our sales for that specific product line were increased by 34.32%.