The 2016 CRM Service Elite: Rx Outreach

Rx Outreach is a nonprofit mail-order pharmacy that supplies deep-discount and no-cost prescription medications to clients who have restricted insurance coverage or no insurance, or who are underinsured. Until recently, the company, based in St. Louis, had busy call centers whose operation needed an upgrade: Frequent phone outages were frustrating Rx Outreach's customers and costing the company money.

This was no small problem. Its 40 to 50 call center agents handled 60,000 to 70,000 calls per month, and the company made 50,000 outbound calls every month to remind patients about prescription refills and notify them when their orders ship. Rx Outreach needed a platform that could improve efficiency and address problems with speech recognition, and it needed to be robust and highly scalable.

It found its solution in VoltDelta's system, which combines speech with a voice user interface design. The deployment, customized for Rx Outreach, included VoltDelta's inbound and outbound interactive voice response (IVR) system, automated call distributor (ACD) with skills-based routing, call and agent screen recording, a surveying tool, real-time reporting, and content management, which allows Rx Outreach to modify IVR prompts and dialogues to quickly adapt to customer inquiries. Customers can use the IVR to enroll, test their eligibility, check their order status, refill prescriptions, and more. A separate line lets them connect to staff pharmacists for questions about specific medications.

VoltDelta was chosen because of its expertise in offering solutions that would integrate well with Rx Outreach's systems and help it realize significant cost savings. The system has saved Rx Outreach about $10,000 a month in phone costs alone.

And it has yielded other immediate results: Calls completed without agent assistance have increased 5 to 10 percent, with 32 to 36 percent of all calls completed entirely through automation.

According to Jeff Clark, chief information officer at Rx Outreach, speech recognition was particularly problematic. Customers calling into the contact center need to provide personal information in order to be prequalified for acceptance, and the company was experiencing issues processing callers' responses. The new system had to offer an easy combination of speech recognition and keypad entry, create a feedback loop, and allow Rx Outreach to expand existing channels of communication and add new ones, such as text messaging, as the company grows.

VoltDelta's IVR provided a speech recognition solution that yielded greater accuracy. "People [have] different accents, they're from different parts of the country, they have different speech patterns, et cetera, and we were really having trouble with some of the voice recognition pieces, and that led to more transferred calls to agents. One of the things that we noticed immediately with the Volt solution is that we were having less of those types of issues."

Rx Outreach also chose to implement VoltDelta's DeltaCast as a new outbound/inbound solution. DeltaCast generates automated campaigns and has cut down on inbound call volume by notifying customers when they need to refill or renew prescriptions. Now, Rx Outreach deploys five different campaigns on a daily basis, including one notifying customers that their program enrollment is about to expire and another telling them when their prescriptions will be mailed.

"What I liked most about VoltDelta was [that] the technical resource they brought in really was focused on process improvement," Clark says. "What we like to do as we're approaching anything is, how can we do this more efficiently, how can we make this easier to use, how can we increase customer satisfaction by what we do, and Volt was really focused on process improvement and really gave us great suggestions in terms of improving our flow." 

SINCE IMPLEMENTING VOLTDELTA'S CLOUD CONTACT CENTER SOLUTION, RX OUTREACH HAS SEEN:

• a savings of $10,000 a month in phone costs;
• a 5 to 10 percent increase in voice self-service usage, with 32 to 36 percent of calls handled entirely through automation; and
• customer satisfaction increase from 88 percent to 93 percent.