A healthier outcome: A CX Moment with Inovalon

Inovalon is the nation’s most widely used healthcare cloud platform. Founded in 1998, the company is a leading provider of cloud-based software solutions, empowering data-driven healthcare that enables better care and health outcomes. More than one million physicians and over 350 million patients are supported within the Inovalon ONE® Platform. The Inovalon ONE® Platform powers 100+ cloud-based solutions that enable improved clinical outcomes and economics across the healthcare ecosystem. That platform, which houses insights gleaned from more than 69 billion medical events, helps Inovalon enable meaningful improvements in the quality and economics of healthcare.

As part of Zendesk’s CX Moment virtual event series, we caught up with Inovalon’s Associate Vice President of Customer Support, Brian Blumenthal. He discussed how his support center is structured to help improve the healthcare outcomes for its users at healthcare organizations across the country.

Creating the best CX and driving retention

Inovalon’s CX team strives for rapid responses, high customer satisfaction, and valuable insights—and uses the data they collect to improve the customer experience.

“How often is our help center used? Is it leading to ticket deflection? Are we given the experience that we need for our customers, and how do we extract that?” asks Blumenthal. “Effort score, customer satisfaction, Net Promoter Score® (NPS)—those are the three things that we measure the most, and we collaborate on ways to improve them on a weekly basis.”

One of the challenges any business faces is dealing with unhappy customers—the healthcare industry is no different.

“It’s about having one-on-one conversations with those individuals that may not have had the best experience with us,” Blumenthal advises. “Let them know that you heard them and follow through with the response. That’s the best way to build trust. And throughout my career, that is the way I’ve saved many, many accounts—put your words into action.”

Empowering CX agents with reliable tools and platforms

Okta is an enterprise-grade identity management service. It can connect any person with any application on any device. Inovalon recently converted one of its flagship applications to use Okta’s multi-factor authentication, but some users struggled with signing into Okta. Finding the balance between ease of use and data security has been tricky for Inovalon’s support team.

“As a support leader, I also need to keep risk out of my business—I just can’t open up administrative privileges to Okta to everyone on my team,” says Blumenthal. “I need to keep [my team members] safe by giving them the minimal necessary information.”

Working with his agents, Blumenthal found a solution using Zendesk’s Application Programming Interface (API) to build a custom app. The app was easy for Blumenthal and his team to build, and it allows for a rapid response.

“We connected it to Okta,” says Blumenthal. “The app is only available when somebody opens up a ticket related to multi-factor authentication. We can use minimal information and help that person out in the moment—and while doing it, we can document in the ticket the issue and how it was resolved.”

With the new app, Blumenthal has full audit controls for his agents. The app is also intuitive and easy to use.

“It took risk out of my business,” Blumenthal explains. “Rapid response. Simple API connection between Zendesk and Okta. And we were off and running.”

Prioritizing resolution times

In the healthcare industry, it’s critical to have a rapid response time. “From a rapid response standpoint, the minute we pick up that phone or we get a chat from the provider, we’ve got to be Johnny-on-the-spot and try to get their issue resolved as quickly and accurately as we can.”

Achieving success through innovation

While there are many different help desk platforms for support teams, Inovalon found its greatest success with Zendesk.

“Zendesk allowed me to be like a Ferrari,” Blumenthal declares. “The administrative tools by Zendesk are the easiest and most flexible I have ever seen. And especially with the API connections, it is almost limitless on what I’ve been able to do with it. So, Zendesk has helped me be as innovative as I absolutely could imagine.”

Missed our chat? Watch the on-demand event with Inovalon’s Brian Blumenthal.