UnitedHealth Group Standardizes on Verint Knowledge Management Enterprise-Wide

Leading health care and well-being company turns to Verint Knowledge Management to empower its organization and workforce.

doctor talking to patient

The benefits

  • $500k

    Reduced annual total cost of ownership by $500,000 versus legacy knowledge platform.

  • 10%

    Improved agent efficiency by 10%.

  • 5 Seconds

    Lowered average search time by 5 seconds.

About UnitedHealth Group (UHG)

UnitedHealth Group (UHG) is a health care and well-being company with a mission to help people live healthier lives and help make the health system work better for everyone. The largest healthcare provider operating across the U.S. and led by 360,000 team members, UHG delivers intelligent, integrated solutions that help to modernize the health system and improve overall population health.

UHG’s legacy knowledge management system went down in 2018. This triggered the need for agents to make 40,000 return calls to customers, as they could not access the information needed to answer customers’ questions and resolve issues. This further cemented the company’s realization that the inability to easily surface the right knowledge was a growing deterrent to higher customer satisfaction and first call resolution. At the same time, it threatened the company’s Medicare STARS rating from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) – a critical measurement of a health plan’s overall quality – exposing the company to potential fines and lower reimbursement rates.

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Modern knowledge management system

The Covid-19 pandemic also challenged UHG. With information changing on a daily and even hourly basis, quickly and consistently relaying accurate information to customers was difficult. Furthermore, the cost of writing and storing this knowledge was exorbitant. As a result, UHG sought a way to achieve efficiencies to lower the total cost of knowledge management.

In 2019, UHG began to modernize its knowledge management system to address member satisfaction, agent productivity, and other key business objectives. The main goal of UHG’s knowledge transformation program was to rearchitect the company’s knowledge management foundation for greater stability and scalability. It needed to be able to make regular, consistent, and seamless updates without downtime negatively impacting business operations.

UHG set a vision to bring knowledge directly into the agent workflow, eliminating the need to pivot from one system to another to search for information. To accomplish this, UHG needed to surface content from its Salesforce and Pegasystems applications without the need for custom APIs or content being driven from disconnected knowledge systems associated with each distinct CRM platform.

Empowering the organization and workforce with Verint Knowledge Management

UHG turned to Verint Knowledge Management  to empower its organization and workforce. With the solution, users can share core, industry-specific content, customize content and knowledge taxonomy based on specific work types, and segment content by user group. This enables quick and easy access to information for users across various domain expertise, roles, and platforms. Individuals across the business, with a variety of skill sets and standards managed through a center of excellence, update and maintain one centralized authoring and publishing platform to ensure a standardized knowledge format.

At its core, Verint Knowledge Management makes knowledge easily consumable throughout the rapidly expanding healthcare leader. Agents can quickly and easily find answers when working independently, avoiding long handle times while, at the same time, improving the employee experience. Similarly, the Verint solution enhances digital-first engagement for customers, as they can get the help they need via intuitive self-service.

“With Verint, we were able to manage over 80,000 total knowledge articles across more than 40,000 users and 50 distinct roles and functions,” says Angela Sanders, Director of Knowledge Management at UnitedHealth Group. “In a highly regulated industry, the ability to centrally maintain, publish, and push content to these users is paramount to our success.”

UHG team authors approve and make knowledge available to the organization with no downtime. Knowledge articles are stored once and accessed often, as opposed to having to utilize additional storage via replication, making the company’s knowledge program even more efficient.

Reduced total cost of ownership, improved efficiency, and elevated customer and employee satisfaction

UHG has transformed the way knowledge is created, curated, and consumed, aligning to meet all business needs without the need for customization. The company estimates it is saving $500,000 annually in total cost of ownership versus its legacy knowledge platform.

Knowledge processes are imbedded into UHG’s business practices to help realize positive business results. Average search time has been reduced by five seconds. Additionally, a 10 percent gain in agent efficiency was achieved by eliminating the need to toggle between multiple systems and reducing the amount of “clicks” to get to the information needed.

By improving access to information directly in the agent workflow, UHG anticipates a one to two percent improvement in customer satisfaction scores. Plus, by simplifying the agent experience, the organization anticipates improvements in employee experience. Already, UHG has seen increased employee satisfaction ratings from three to five stars for one of 20 critical work types after making incremental improvements through integration of knowledge central content via links in its CRM systems.

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