2020 was undoubtedly an unprecedented year as COVID-19 has impacted, disrupted, and redefined every single industry worldwide. The pandemic forced organizations to move to a networked approach to business continuity planning, working from home, and video conferencing.

Healthcare businesses were not the exception as 2020 brought plenty of changes and challenges, forcing them to rethink the user experience. Common health activities that used to require face-to-face interaction with patients in clinic and field settings were quickly considered dangerous and in-person consultations were no longer a safe option. Minimizing the risk of exposure, illness, and spread of disease became the top priority.

Quarantines and shelter-in-place orders forced companies to transition to a new remote-working mode that resulted in fewer customer service agents available significantly reducing many organizations’ bandwidth while the volume of calls from consumers with worries, issues, or questions increased dramatically.

Due to this, one of our clients in the healthcare sector had to identify strategies to improve the efficiency of its in-house sales line to continue being competitive in an industry traditionally led by face-to-face interactions. This created the necessity of moving from a one-on-one work model to a new virtual model since social distancing restrictions were affecting its normal way of doing business and negatively impacting its overall sales.

OneLink and its innovation team first had to create and review the new customer journey. After analyzing and studying the journey customers now had to face, our team focused on identifying customer pain points and opportunities for technology improvements as limited face-to-face interactions demanded a shift in priorities to meet new competitive ways of doing business.

OneLink’s innovative approach and cutting edge technology resulted in a solution that not only automated many of the processes but also reduced the average time per conversation, while also lowering the paperwork, personnel, and visit times for effective affiliations resulting in Modelo Único de Gestión (MUG), a unified management model.

MUG digitalized membership forms where applications were able to be sent by email reducing physical documentation by 75%.  Additionally, MUG created a better way to segment the specialized team members according to the needs of operations, such as Commercial Advisors, Backoffice, or Messengers/documenters. This segmentation generated an operational improvement from a system of a physical collection of signatures and mail management of 65%, going from 750 signatures to 1,237 and, by the end of 2020, it was possible to reach 2,000 affiliations in the PC (Complementary Plan) and PBS (Health Benefit Plan). A growth of 266% in less than a year.

These solutions not only met our clients’ needs and developed better experiences for their customers, but they also have granted OneLink the Leadership in Consumers’ Value Award by Frost & Suvillan, for our ability, scalability, and capacity to fulfill all the needs from new, fast, and dynamic growing businesses. Its development team uses emerging technologies to speed up the solutions in terms of market launching timing. It analyzes the consumer interfaces and the mobile interactions to develop automated processes and systems that allow the agents to be more receptive and at the same time decrease their workload.