Customer Portal

Discovery

When I first came to Florida Blue, advocates were using 14 different legacy systems to do their jobs. CustomerConnect was created to replace all of them — reducing training time and becoming the one-stop shop to meet all needs of the member.

The Contact Member Service Center is an operations machine, and the member journey begins the second they pick up the phone. Each phone call costs Florida Blue about nine dollars on average — so it's the job of User Experience to make the tools as efficient as possible and keep administrative costs low.

Initially, CustomerConnect was envisioned as a touch-screen interface for retail centers, sales agents, and office advocates. As the application matured, it became clear the landing page needed to be redesigned to reduce Average Handle Time (AHT) and predict what a member may be calling about. We went to our users and partnered with Medicare and Commercial businesses to deliver quantifiable results — lower operational cost, better quality scores, and increased NPS.

Research

After spending hundreds of hours with advocates on live calls, I can truly empathize with the amount of knowledge they need to retain to best serve customers. We met weekly in one-on-one and focus group sessions throughout this process.

Authentication was the first bottleneck we tackled. We found authentication takes an average of 45 seconds. The number of fields had grown over time, so we made a conscious decision to limit information to just what is needed to authenticate — plus key indicators about the member's current health journey.

Our users were predominantly looking at complex, dense data. We aimed to simplify this by creating a visual timeline of the member's last six months of interactions, claims, care gaps, and authorizations — letting an advocate quickly dive into any record without navigating to separate pages. We also surfaced the most recent calls, claims, and authorizations within the last 90 days to predict what a member may be calling about.

Key features designed:

• Financial Summary — a quick breakdown of a member's monthly bill, with hover states to reveal LIS, LEP, and subsidy amounts
• Customer Timeline — a visual representation of the last 6 months of interactions to identify trends and navigate to record details
• Predictive Sorting — surfacing the most recently interacted records to create a more engaging member experience
• Key Notifications — dynamic, context-driven alerts that cue advocates to intervene on the fly

Results

Throughout the CustomerConnect journey, it has been a guiding principle to measure the impact of every large feature and redesign — proving the value of design thinking to the business.

The original CustomerConnect release scored a user satisfaction score of just 31%. Over time, we made users and stakeholders partners in continuous improvement. The last survey scored 92% satisfaction.

We conducted an A/B test on the new portal landing page — half of advocates using the new feature, half the old screen. The result was a reduction of approximately ~70 seconds of AHT, equating to roughly $1 million per year in savings.

CustomerConnect as a whole, 2017–2020:

• Member Inquiry cost-per-call decreased from $8.69 to $6.25 — resulting in $4.95 million in savings
• Average Handle Time decreased by 117 seconds
• Net Promoter Score increased from 9 to 34
• Customer Satisfaction increased from 65% to 77%
• First Call Resolution increased from 69% to 77%