One way Health Care Services Corporation (HCSC) builds and maintains its competitive advantage is by consistently delivering high-quality customer service to its members. Although each customer interaction is essential and leaves a lasting impression, it is especially true when our members are dealing with a severe illness or emergency. HCSC’s Learning and Quality functions maintain a close partnership to ensure our members’ claims are processed correctly, and they receive consistent, high-quality service with each customer interaction. At HCSC, we realized the powerful results that this type of partnership could deliver when the customer service and responsiveness indicators were measurably improved as a direct outcome of organizationally joining the Learning and Quality functions under a shared services division.
While a supportive or even aligned learning approach can be collaborative, the partnered Learning and Quality functions go to the next step by sharing quality performance goals, access to data, and an everyday leadership that can drive integrated and focused actions. For example, historical data was used to identify specific error types and opportunities for improvement. After analyzing and reviewing information, critical learning, and non-learning solutions were implemented. These included instructor-led general lectures for group discussions, traditional web-based modules, innovative mini-movies, improved or enhanced process documentation, and process or workflow improvements.
To address knowledge gaps and reduce the number of errors, learning created a series of short, task-specific learning solutions. These solutions effectively pinpointed specific operator actions that led to mistakes. Employees completed the instructor-led solutions in team huddles, where they can discuss and review common errors. Also, employees completed quick, self-paced, refreshers via the learning management system. In doing so, employees identified common mistakes, recalled operational fundamentals, and applied best practices associated with recent and specific trends. The self-paced content comprised web-based lessons with quizzes and innovative mini-movies that presented the topic in story form.
Learning and Quality collaboratively evaluated the learning solutions to objectively determine if the solutions meet employees’ needs, provide the knowledge necessary to improve employee performance, and positively impact the business. The evaluation results demonstrated that when Learning and Quality partner to provide targeted and specific learning solutions and quality coaching and monitoring, both the learning experience for employees and customer service improved by an average of 60% for ten unique learning solutions.
- Learning and Quality functional leads drive the program and regularly access the error trends, solution completion rates, and report results
- Solutions must be easily accessible and targeted to address only the specific knowledge gap
- All employees are required to complete the learning solution even if they have not committed an error
- Employees complete the solutions within the expected timeframe
