Excellus BlueCross BlueShield Selects Nexidia to Improve Customer Service and Streamline Call Center Operations.

ATLANTA -- Nexidia, the market-leading provider of audio search and speech analytics solutions, today announced that nonprofit Excellus BlueCross BlueShield has adopted Nexidia's Enterprise Speech Intelligence speech analytics (part of Nexidia's QuickStart program) for its call center. Excellus BCBS chose Nexidia to help improve customer satisfaction scores, gain insight into the reasons behind repeat callers and misdirected calls, increase first-call resolution, and promote customer satisfaction advocate training around call types.

Headquartered in Rochester, NY, Excellus BCBS is part of a family of companies that finances and delivers vital health care services to 1.7 million people across upstate New York. The Excellus BCBS call center employs 414 people and handles a weekly volume of approximately 60,000 calls.

Excellus BCBS understood that deploying flexible speech analytics was one way to access more call content and thereby improve customer service. It started using Nexidia's hosted OnDemand platform in early 2009.

"We've seen the positive impact Nexidia has had on our call center operations," said Nancy Sakran, Director Customer Service for Excellus BCBS. "By working with Nexidia's professional services team and using the company's real-time, same-day analysis, we've been able to quickly get to the root causes of key customer issues and identify areas to improve and watch, such as potential fraud cases. Additionally, supervisors can use the detailed analysis of call types to offer customer satisfaction advocates one-on-one, personalized coaching and suggest any necessary Web site improvements."

The Nexidia QuickStart solution

With Nexidia's QuickStart program, Excellus BCBS was able to leverage the Nexidia OnDemand hosted solution to launch speech analytics more quickly and efficiently. By using Nexidia OnDemand, Excellus BCBS was able to access the full suite of capabilities in Nexidia's Enterprise Speech Intelligence application. And because ESI integrates with multiple legacy call loggers, meta-data was easily brought into the system to be reviewed and analyzed.

The key reason why Excellus BCBS chose Nexidia was to understand the root causes behind several call center issues, such as the repeat caller rate. Excellus BCBS also wanted to offer real-time coaching to customer satisfaction advocates based on feedback from Nexidia's system. Because Nexidia is capable of processing a high volume of voice content and has drill-down features, the solution provides managers with the details they need to design more effective customer satisfaction training or Web site enhancements that map back to call types. Nexidia will allow Excellus BCBS to move first call resolution (FCR) tracking to a more dynamic, sophisticated level that will offer more business insight, faster. By improving FCR and providing personalized, ongoing customer satisfaction training, Excellus BCBS will streamline its call center operations to achieve higher customer satisfaction while reducing operational costs.

"Every industry has its challenges and the health care industry is not immune to increasing consumer expectations around customer service," said John Willcutts, president and chief executive officer of Nexidia. "Armed with Nexidia's tools, Excellus BCBS will be even better prepared to analyze calls coming into its call center allowing the company to spend more time answering the critical health care questions of its members."

About Nexidia

Nexidia is the audio and video search company with patented technologies and breakthrough applications that enable customers to quickly gain new insight, build competitive advantage and realize the amazing possibilities now discoverable in audio and video content from contact centers, media outlets, government intelligence and legal discovery. For more information, please visit http://www.nexidia.com/.

About Excellus BlueCross BlueShield

Excellus BlueCross BlueShield, a nonprofit independent licensee of the BlueCross BlueShield Association, is part of a family of companies that finances and delivers vital health care services to more than 1.7 million people across upstate New York. Excellus BlueCross BlueShield provides access to high-quality, affordable health coverage, including valuable health-related resources that our members use every day, such as cost-saving prescription drug discounts and wellness tracking tools in our Step Up program. To learn more, visit excellusbcbs.com.