Health solutions company Florida Blue’s Sales Talent Management Program immerses new Blue Direct Sales Agents in a variety of knowledge, behavior, and skills-based courses and activities aimed at increasing retention of knowledge, driving desired sales competencies and behaviors, and enhancing skills essential to any sales role at Florida Blue, Florida’s Blue Cross and Blue Shield company.
The program is designed to have a positive impact on business goals around submission and sales performance (premium, health sales, ancillary packaging, and time to competency), call quality, and customer satisfaction.
A variety of training methods is used in the training program, including classroom, virtual training, computer-based training, call observation, and role-plays. The six-week curriculum covers a variety of topics, which include:
- Florida Blue company information (mission, vision, values)
- Health and ancillary products
- Selling skills
- Florida Blue systems and tools
- Effective communication and listening skills
- Effective call handling and customer satisfaction and loyalty
- Compliance for government programs and commercial business
New Hire Nesting
Following successful completion of the formal training program, a four-week nesting program begins immediately. During nesting, new hires take live calls, which helps to reinforce positive behaviors and habits and enhance performance projections and progression toward time to competency. It also helps close the process gap between training and the sales floor. Participants receive just-in-time coaching from a team of coaching experts:
- Call coach (product knowledge, call management, applications, call takeover)
- Quality coach (customer satisfaction, compliance, call flow)
- Systems coach (system navigation and troubleshooting problems)
- Manager (provides coaching and builds trust and relationships with new hires)
Statistics are compiled on each trainee on a daily basis, providing information on submission performance, packaging, and quality. Completed by the sales trainer, the nesting report contains data on agents’ gaps and daily debrief notes, and is submitted at the conclusion of each day.
The Sales Talent Management program includes performance gates, which help to define successful progression and communicate clear expectations up front to the trainee. Performance gates are administered at predefined times during the training period, as well as during nesting.
Results
Sales Training has collaborated with Blue Direct in supporting the achievement of goals established for several business metrics, including:
- Time to Competency: It used to take new hires nine months to achieve full competency. With the Sales Talent Management program, 100 percent of new hires reach full competency in three months; 50 percent are successful in one month.
- Satisfaction “Top Box Scores”: The goal established was for a member satisfaction score of 53 percent; agent, 59 percent; and first call resolution (FCR), 83 percent. Actual results were: member satisfaction of 84 percent; agent, 64 percent; and FCR, 85 percent.
- Ancillary packaging (packaging of health and ancillary products together in one sale): Goal established was 25 percent for under 65 sales, and 8 percent for Medicare health sales. Actual achievements were 39 percent for under 65 and 9 percent for Medicare.
- Benchmark Portal “Center of Excellence”: Goal was to achieve Center of Excellence rating of Top 100 Call Centers in North America; actual results achieved for last two years: Top 100 in 2011 and Top 10 in 2012.
