Humana creates an effortless customer experience using Nuance Cloud IVR.
Customer callers now make requests using natural speech with streamlined, personalised self-service experiences.
Company profile
Humana offers health insurance to over 13 million customers, with a broad range of services covering everything from dental and vision, to pharmacy and Medicaid. Its variety of services means it receives thousands of different enquiries and requests daily.
Download success story (pdf. Open a new window) View all success stories
Liz Wallace
Vice President of Enterprise Shared Services
Humana
Challenge
- Replace its legacy IVR (interactive voice response) with a more sophisticated system to reduce the need for agent transfers and provide a more seamless experience for customers.
Solution
- Nuance Cloud IVR recognises and predicts more than 1,000 complex customer intents, and accurately transfers customers to the area of the business they need.
Results
- Customers have easier access to health insurance services through new personalised capabilities in the insurer’s IVR. Engagement is faster and the NPS score in the phone channel has increased by 80%.
Background
Humana offers health insurance to over 13 million customers, with a broad range of services covering everything from dental and vision, to pharmacy and Medicaid. Its variety of services means it receives thousands of different enquiries and requests daily.
Humana knew it needed to upgrade its IVR—but a few years back, it hit a breaking point. High customer dissatisfaction, errors in routing which created transfers, and lack of understanding customers’ needs caused an enterprise level focus on making a change.
This prompted an internal assessment of its IVR, and the insurance provider found a wide range of other problems. The 15-year-old legacy platform wasn’t living up to the seamless experience Humana and its customers expected. Its natural language capabilities could only recognise up to 55 different intents, customers frequently found themselves being transferred to the wrong service area, and some customers never made it to the service they needed.
With the platform operating on expensive on-premises infrastructure, it was also difficult to make improvements to it. Humana relied on its internal IT department to make any optimisations, and it didn’t have the speech scientists it needed to create a modern IVR experience.
With a new organisation-wide focus on customer experience, and an expanding number of insurance services, Humana knew it needed an expert partner to help it integrate a more cost-effective, intelligent platform into its offering.