UPMC Health Plan - Sales Support Team of the Year

Company: UPMC Health Plan, Pittsburgh, PA
Company Description: UPMC is a world-renowned health care provider and insurer. Based in Pittsburgh Pennsylvania, UPMC is inventing new models of accountable, cost-effective, patient-centered care. We provide more than $1.2 billion a year in benefits to our communities, including more care to the region’s most vulnerable citizens than any other health care institution.
Nomination Category: Sales Awards Team Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Sales Support Team of the Year - Other Service Industries

Nomination Title: 2021 Medicare Sales Support Team

Briefly describe the nominated team: its history and past performance (up to 200 words):

The UPMC Medicare Sales Support Team is a two-time Silver Stevie Award Winner. This department started in 2017; we have only existed for three years and have over 20 years of experience. Our team consists of one Manager, one Supervisor, one Trainer, and seven Front-line employees. The Medicare Market fluctuates each year which means that our call volume increases as well. To account for these changes, we have created a scalable resource for the teams we support. Each year we assist with the closing of sales through the completion of insurance applications, outbound call campaigns, customer follow-up calls and helping the customer learn about our products in the way they want. This year, to account for the annual increase in call volume, we interviewed and hired 50 employees to help us to execute top support results. We support three different Sales teams, and their clients enroll into the Medicare plans right for them.

Please see slides 3 – 7 of the attached for photos and more information.

Outline the team's achievements since July 1 2019 that you wish to bring to the judges' attention (up to 250 words):

While obstacles this year have been many, our ability to stay focused on maintaining normal business functions has been outstanding. We were able to outperform previous years. Our team has, traditionally, worked in the office; during the pandemic we transitioned to remote working. While preparing our scalability plan, we determined we needed to deploy temporary employees to work from home. We successfully onboarded and deployed 50 temporary employees. Through innovation and creative planning, we were able to turn our training plan into a virtual hands-on learning.

Our team focused on its efforts to increase client satisfaction and improve on current processes. We created client satisfaction surveys to measure our effectiveness with the different support processes that we provide; this allowed us to make real time decisions and changes to increase the efficiency of our process. Our goal is to increase the productivity of the sales teams so their time can be spent focusing on teaching customers about our products. We do this through managing the sales team’s voicemails, making follow up calls with clients, completing the sales application and answering quick product and eligibility questions from each team.

While the transition to home was unexpected, we were able to keep high moral and engagement through virtual means. We had team meetings, disbursed webcams to all agents, and had an employee engagement committed focused on using remote friendly mediums and events. This helped to keep team members social while boosting productivity.

Please see slides 8-11 in our supporting documentation.

Explain why the achievements you have highlighted are unique or significant. If possible compare the achievements to the performance of other players in your industry and/or to the team's past performance (up to 250 words):

In the past years we have hired more then 80 temporary employees to assist us with our increase in market demand. This year we scaled down - we were able to read the incoming market and capitalize on the better work/life balance that is achieved by hiring employees to work remotely. Through this balance the team was able to focus more time on the effectiveness of our support processes. We could request more overtime from both temporary and full-time staff as well as see productivity gains through the elimination of commute times and absenteeism. Although we hired fewer people, we were able to gain better results for application production. We took the most applications with less employees - in 2019 we took a total of 12,345 and in 2020 we took 18,132.

To maintain our staffing numbers during this time, we needed to increase the employee engagement that we had from previous years. Using Microsoft Teams, we were able to connect with our team through web cams and instant messaging. Teams chats became our norm, as was urging the team to share personal experience through our employee engagement team. Temporary employees were able to integrate themselves into the team experience. This showed more dedication from both full time and temporary employees; we saw more hours of overtime completed therefore we had more time to complete our sales productivity enhancing processes.

Please see slides 12-15 in our supporting documentation for more details.

Reference any attachments of supporting materials throughout this nomination and how they provide evidence of the claims you have made in this nomination (up to 250 words):

Overall, 2020 was a challenging year, but we were able to overcome those challenges through a successful temporary employee deployment and employee engagement strategy. To learn more about our approach please see our supporting documentation:

The University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC) is a $21 billion health care provider. As the largest nongovernmental employer in Pennsylvania, the company supports more than 90,000 employees, 40 hospitals, 700 doctors’ offices, and a 3.9 million-member Insurance Services Division.