Department Overhaul Drives an 18% Revenue Lift
What happens when growth is stagnant in payer organizations, despite rate increases and other actions to drive growth? In this case study, we’ll discuss how a health care data analytics company helped its payer clients identify, understand and overcome a wide range of road blocks, helping to jumpstart strategic growth.
Situation
A payer was experiencing stagnant, single-digit growth over a three-year period, despite percentage rate increases, strong satisfaction scores and positive net promoter score (NPS) results for the existing business. They turned to an analytics provider specializing in healthcare to deconstruct why they were missing growth targets at their largest and most tenured health plan and third-party administrator (TPA) accounts, which represented 80 percent of their revenue.
At the time, the company had expanded its product portfolio through a combination of targeted acquisitions and internal product development efforts. Six client success teams with 102 associates operated independent of each other and were segmented by product and client type (payer, provider, employer). More than 28 unique job descriptions existed across all client associates, with no identification of solution suites outside those directly managed. In eight instances, the company had multiple client success teams supporting the same clients without coordination or collaboration across the teams or with sales.
Challenge
While quarterly planning meetings were occurring with the largest clients, intelligence showed that discussions were entirely focused on existing services, despite the company’s broad and growing product portfolio. Additionally, client success associates were recognized and rewarded based on client satisfaction scores, operational metrics, and client retention with no integration between or across teams. Minimal attention was being given to growth initiatives, as no pay-for-performance was linked to growth.
Approach
The initial task was to identify roadblocks related to policies, procedures, incentives, roles, responsibilities, development needs and market alignment impacting strategic account growth within the Customer Success and Sales teams functions. Leadership prioritized elimination of roadblocks based on scope of impact, including revenue opportunity, applicability across all book-of-business, timing, resource investment, and risk/reward.
Once priorities were established, this intelligence drove development of a detailed go-to-market (GTM) plan for client success which included:
Consolidating job descriptions to six
Establishing a rewards-based compensation model
Rolling out requisite and scored cross-training product modules
Creating a base-line job fit assessment
Designing and launching a corporate-wide client scorecard and supporting a communication framework (meetings, calls, clear and defined objectives, etc.)
Results
With these changes, the payer saw a 15% point increase in client retention, Net Promoter scorecard and tracking. They experienced a 10% growth with three months of Go Live, and 18% growth six months post Go Live, with no involuntary staff turnover during the reengineering initiative.