At Covered California, our goal for social customer service is to provide members with “robust, responsive customer support via social media.” We are the only health insurance exchange in the nation (as established by the Affordable Care Act) that has implemented a social customer care program at this scale.
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Company: Covered California
Entry submitted by: Amanda Danley (Senior Marketing Specialist)
Community/Social Channels:
Facebook (English): https://www.facebook.com/CoveredCA/
Twitter (English): https://twitter.com/CoveredCA
Instagram (English + Spanish): https://www.instagram.com/coveredca/
Facebook (Spanish): https://www.facebook.com/CoveredCAEspanol/
Twitter (Spanish): https://twitter.com/CoveredCA_es
Lithy category: Social Support Champion
Covered California is the state-based health insurance exchange under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) where Californians can get brand-name health coverage. It’s the only place to get federal premium assistance to help lower the cost of having health insurance.
Social Customer Service Initiatives in 2016-2017
At Covered California, our goal for social customer service is to provide members with “robust, responsive customer support via social media.” In early 2016, we increased the number of customer service staff and all were trained to provide professional support using a “singular brand voice” available on both our English and Spanish channels. We utilized Lithium Social Media Management (SMM) for Service for efficient, coordinated, and collaborative responding. Ensuring we replied quickly, we set our target response time to within 2-hours during business hours.
To achieve this goal, we improved our relationships with other Covered California departments and partner organizations in order provide exceptional, rapid support. Communication with department leads were enhanced to provide daily consumer journey experience reports. Our team monitored for any service disruptions, website outages, complaints from high profile members, and provided daily feedback to leadership on “what we’re seeing” on social so any necessary adjustments or corrections could be made.
Additionally, unique and creative customer service content was developed and promoted each month, to raise awareness among our current and potential consumers about the availability of meaningful customer support options through social channels.
Social Customer Service Approach
Covered California is the only health insurance exchange in the nation (as established by the Affordable Care Act) that has implemented a social customer care program at this scale. Our team understands that purchasing and using health insurance can be a complicated and confusing process, which may deter individuals from signing up for coverage. Challenges such as high Service Center call volumes, especially during deadline periods, that lead many members to reach out to us via social media.
The Social Team strives to improve the overall consumer experience, respond to questions, resolve issues quickly, reduce brand risk, and improve sentiment by listening and building positive relationships with our customers. We also coordinate with our Service Center Resolution Teams to escalate complicated cases, where members then receive a phone call directly, usually within the same day. Our team works to ensure each incoming post and conversation is “touched,” and overall, we have a flush rate of less than 1%.
Customer service content examples:
The Results
Utilizing Lithium SMM for Service, the Covered California Social Team can keep up with the increase in incoming social media traffic that occurs during each year’s three-month Open Enrollment (OE) period. During the last OE, we received over 30,000 posts, an increase of 28% from the previous OE period. We handled over 18,000 conversations, a 35% increase. Despite an increase in posts/conversations, our team improved response times. Consumers received a brand reply within 2-business hours 84% of the time, a 2% improvement from last year’s agent Service Level Agreement (SLA). Currently, the team is unable to measure customer satisfaction across social channels (CSAT), or its call deflections/decreased complaints due to social care, therefore the improvement in agent SLA was considered a successful Key Performance Indicator.
Our team was also highly effective at reducing negative sentiment, improving brand perception, and building positive relationships with consumers/members. We converted 56% of incoming negative conversations into either neutral or positive. Additionally, we effectively improved the sentiment of negative or neutral-minded/feeling customers, increasing positive conversation sentiment by 460% – starting conversation sentiment compared with closing/ending sentiment.
Not only did the number of incoming posts and conversations increase during the most recent OE, the percentage of relevant/actionable issues increased. There was a 14% increase of cases that were closed as “resolved,” and “irrelevant” cases dropped by 12%. Our team excelled at handling the increase in volume of actionable issues, and did so faster than the previous year. We were also successful at significantly reducing negative sentiment and increasing positive sentiment towards the brand.
Our Customer Service content performed very well by receiving an overall 2.05% engagement rate on Twitter, and 1.3% on Facebook, which indicated a high level of interest in receiving support via social.
Lastly, the team continually stays motivated by the customer “thank you’s” received:
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