Solutions Provided

• The nine-year relationship between Cerium Networks and Allegiance has proven that a trusted consultative technology partner can be among the greatest assets a company has.
• Cerium deployed the Calabrio® QM recording solution for Allegiance, allowing for total call recording along with quality management.
• Cerium worked with Allegiance to optimize their contact center. This allowed Allegiance to design call flows to align with business strategies and to improve call handling and response times.

Every business that the Allegiance customer service team supports has different rules and processes to be followed, so the agent training is very client-specific. Allegiance needed to meet their contractual obligations under the constraints of their existing call handling rules.

Another engagement over the Summer of 2014 included a contact center optimization with auto-answer. Cerium worked with Allegiance to optimize their call flows to align with business strategies and to improve call handling and response times. With a goal to meet SLAs within technical and resource constraints, the contact center optimization engagement significantly altered the call handling strategy by funneling provider calls towards self-service. By streamlining call routing and routing callers towards self-service, callers could be educated in the availability of online service tools.

Gary Ritter, Director of Technical Claims Services, says, “The vectoring of provider calls to the IVR system has allowed agents to answer member calls more quickly. The contact center solution is easy to customize, and supports our performance guarantees to our customers.”

“When a call comes into the queue, if an agent is available, they get a beep in the ear, and then the call comes to them. This makes auto-answer a great scenario for meeting the SLA. It was quite a transition for people (310 employees),” said Timothy Streets, Telecomm Engineer.

Lessons Learned

Eric Jensen, Director of Information Technologies, says, “Both the reporting and the vectoring of calls are the most important features of our current system and upgrades. People don’t like to be transferred… so that is probably the single most important feature; however, the reporting is important to managing the call center as well. Cerium helped us review our reports to provide an accurate interpretation of usage, and how to best optimize it.”

Cerium Networks first began a partnership with Allegiance Benefit Plan Management in April 2006 when awarded the contract for an upgrade of their aged Mitel system. The solution contracted for was the Avaya Communication Manager, Contact Center Elite, Avaya CMS, Intuity Audix and the Mercom call recording solution.

Cerium has since been involved in two major upgrades to Allegiance’s communications solutions. The most recent was the upgrade deployed on the midsize enterprise servers supporting virtualized applications for Aura Communication Manager 6.3, Application Enablement Server (AES), Session Manager, System Manager, and Aura Presence. The upgrade, which included Session Manager, provided more capabilities in the configuration than Allegiance previously had. In the fall of 2014, Allegiance implemented Microsoft Exchange UM as their messaging platform. The longevity of this technology partnership demonstrates both Allegiance’s dedication to efficient technologies and Cerium’s success as a consultative partner with excellence in service. When asked what has fostered this long-term relationship, Gary Ritter offers the following, “Responsiveness as a vendor to our needs as a customer. That’s been a big factor. The second thing is Cerium has the ability to be a consultant as well as provide technical support. Both of those have been very helpful to us.”

About Allegiance

Originally founded in 1981 as Intermountain Administrators, Allegiance Benefit Plan Management, Inc. has been a leader in providing health and flexible benefit plans to employer groups and plan participants nationwide. As a third-party administrator, Allegiance offers clients the flexibility to contract with multiple preferred provider organizations, managed care organizations, physician hospital organizations, tertiary care centers of excellence, dental and vision plans, and stop-loss insurance carriers.

In 2008, the Allegiance family of companies became wholly-owned subsidiaries of Cigna Corporation. Allegiance represents Cigna’s strategy to compete in the market segment that desires TPA rather than fully bundled large carrier products, and has seen significant growth across the nation.

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Effective communication is the essential element found in all successful business relationships. Employee productivity and customer satisfaction can rise and fall based on this key element. Cerium is in the business of taking basic business communication to new levels of collaboration with our industry-leading solutions designed to keep workers and customers engaged. So, we understand the importance of effective communication.