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Case Study: Blue Cross & Blue Shield of Florida Focuses on Communication
April 20, 2009
When its customers and distribution channel partners were missing what Blue Cross & Blue Shield of Florida had to offer, it turned to an outside learning vendor for a push in the right direction.
By Margery Weinstein
Eight years ago, trainers at Blue Cross & Blue Shield of Florida Inc. received a challenge from company leadership: Teach brokers and salespeople to better sell and represent its products in the marketplace.
The problem, says Leader, Sales Communication Jep Larkin was (and is) that health care is complex. Blue Cross & Blue Shield of Florida's customers and distribution channel partners were confused by the company's offerings. "They needed better clarity in understanding our products and services," he says. What the company needed was a way to better train and communicate with customers and business partners. The solution came in the form of on-demand learning and communication technology from Brainshark. "People don't read much anymore, and full-blown video is so expensive," says Larkin. "Brainshark seemed to fit a niche. It wasn't full-blown video, but it wasn't big, thick paper either."
Use of an outside learning vendor also helped the company meet its challenge of training in an environment of limited resources. It needed a way to offer up-to-date information to customers and distribution partners that wouldn’t overburden its training infrastructure. "We were looking at ways to reduce development time of materials," says Leader, Sales Training and Development Scott Bryant. The health-care industry evolves at such a rapid rate, he observes, so it seems there's constantly some new product or process coming out to support distribution channel partners and customers. Then, too, he says, “our instructional design model was old. We needed better tools to do more rapid instructional design, and be able to distribute [learning] more quickly to a broader audience."
Blue Cross & Blue Shield of Florida also needed to better particularize its training to the audiences it serves. "We have 13 locations around the state," Bryant explains, "so we need to be local in our approach to taking care of Floridians with our products." The diversity of people it serves along with the multiple agents who serve those individuals meant the company needed a tool that was adaptable. "We saw this as a great opportunity to be able to use this tool to get out educational material for things such as product launches," he says, "and to provide reference material you could update in real time."
The company also started using Brainshark technology in enrollment meetings with companies and individual customers. "Agents utilize Brainshark capabilities in sharing presentations about products, and also are able to get instant access to materials when they're with a customer," Bryant points out.
With the tool a good fit for its needs, the next potential obstacle was training its administrators how to use and roll it out. As there is with the rollout of any new technology, says Bryant, there was hesitancy at first, but this initial anxiety soon was replaced by enthusiasm. The company was careful to educate its people on the value of the tool and how to use it, but they became converts when they saw its value for themselves. "Once people start seeing results," he says, "that it's making your job or life much easier, then you constantly go back to it."
Over time, the tool has gotten better in functionality, and its users are becoming more proficient at making the most of its capabilities. "As with any development tool, you learn some of the tricks of the trade to be able to edit material quicker and get better at voiceover and writing and recording of scripts, which leads to a more clear and concise message," says Bryant.
Blue Cross & Blue Shield of Florida now is using the Brainshark tool for compliance and Medicaid- and Medicare-required certification programs, as well. Larkin adds that the company also is taking advantage of Brainshark’s tracking features. "Marketing communications can be very expensive, so we've started using the ability to track if someone is reading or viewing our communications. If we activate that feature in Brainshark, we can do 100 percent tracking. That gives us good stats on who's viewing the presentation."
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