UPMC - 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: UPMC

The University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC) is a $21 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.

The UPMC Medicare Sales Support Team is a 2021 Gold Stevie Award Winner. This department started in 2017; we have only existed for four years but have a combined over 21 years of experience. Our team has one Manager, Supervisor, Trainer, and ten front-line employees. The Medicare Market fluctuates each year which means that our call volume increases as well. To account for these changes our team is scalable. Each year we assist with the closing of sales through completion of insurance applications, outbound call campaigns, customer follow up calls and helping the customer learn about our products in the way that works for them. This year, to account for the annual increase in call volume, we interviewed and hired 49 employees. The team supports three different Sales teams and their clients to enroll into the Medicare plans that fits their needs.

We experienced a tough recruitment year for our scalable staff, even though those challenges we were able to staff and maintain our normal business functions. Since the pandemic our team has switched from in-office to remote working. One of the changes kept from 2020 was allowing temporary employees working remotely. We onboarded and trained 49 temporary employees. Perseverance, creativity were key skills in changing our training plan into a remote yet hands-on learning process.

In this environment our team continued efforts to increase client satisfaction and improve on current processes. We have both client satisfaction and customer satisfaction surveys. Each is used to measure our level of service and our effectiveness for each. Using real-time feedback on each process is instrumental on how we manage our key initiatives. The core goal of our department is to increase the effectiveness of the sales teams so their time can be spent focusing on educating consumers on our products. Some of the processes evaluated are completing the sales application and answering quick product and eligibility questions for each team.

Working remotely has had a positive impact to the permanent team as well as our temporary staff, we were able to keep employees engaged through virtual means and interactive events. We continued team meetings, mandated webcams to all agents, and had an employee engagement committee focused on using remote friendly mediums and events. We also had our first in-person team building exercise since 2019. This boosted our productivity and kept the team engaged.

Based on the ongoing pandemic, this year we scaled down - we were ready for the tough employment market. We kept our staff engaged through extending the work from home option to capitalize on the better work/life balance. We were also able to open our recruitment strategy to the nation instead of staying with in the office area. Since the temporary role was remote, we were ablet to still meet our employee need. With our permanent staff we saw they were more willing to work overtime during our peak season, which allowed us to hire less staff than we had in the past. Although we hired fewer people, we were able to take more resource unit calls. We increased calls by 144% from 2020 to 2021.

Even with challenging recruitment and fewer staff we were able to achieve high client satisfaction. We were able to achieve a Customer Satisfaction Rate of 96% for our application process and a Client Satisfaction Rating of 95% in our resource unit.

In terms of maintaining our staffing numbers during this time, we needed to keep employees engaged. In addition to using Microsoft Teams, we connected through web cams during team meetings and our team chat became even more valuable then in 2020. We involved temporary employees into the team experience. We saw more hours of overtime completed by staff and since the vaccine we were able to have our first in-person team-building event. Per our engagement survey we saw a 5% improvement in engagement.

Overall, 2021 had its own unique obstacles, but the team pulled through and stepped up to the challenge without losing their positivity or decrease their performance. To learn more about our approach please see our supporting documentation.

Please see slides 4–7 of the attached documentation for team photos and more background information.

Please see slides 8-10 in our supporting documentation for specific information.

Please see slides 12-14 in our supporting documentation for more detailed information on our 2020 Performance.