Summary
- Stride Health is a California-based startup that connects individuals with health plans to which they’re entitled under the Affordable Care Act.
- Their contact-heavy sales process and highly qualified team of agents means that efficiency gains can quickly translate into substantial cost savings.
- Since introducing Lang, Stride has seen substantial improvements across a range of key metrics, including email volume, resolution times, closure rates, and staffing costs.
Key results
21% reduction in email traffic: Overall email volume at Stride Health has fallen by 21% thanks to Lang — in stark contrast to an expected 30% rise.
50% increase in health plan closes: Stride has seen a year-on-year increase in closes of over 50% — already a 6x multiplier on their initial investment in Lang.
40% faster response times: Between 2022 and 2023, first response times fell by over 3 hours on average — which Stride attributes directly to Lang.
$25k/week lower staffing costs: By automating a significant proportion of manual tasks, Stride was able to reduce weekly staffing costs by close to $25k.
Background
We spoke with Blaine Dively — Director of Member Experience at Stride Health — to understand the detail behind the improvements Lang has introduced. He’s an experienced CX leader, with a resume that includes Amazon, Fanatics, and Lyft as well as a Six Sigma black belt. Now at Stride, he’s at the helm of the member experience team, applying his expertise in contact center operations to introduce new efficiencies and build structure.
“At Stride, we’re in a pretty unique niche within health,” Blaine explains,
“In order for us to make money there are four areas of the customer journey that have to sync up.” Blaine’s team focuses on two of those areas — firstly ensuring when someone selects a health plan, they follow the process through to purchasing — what Stride terms “effectuating” the plan. The second part is communicating with the membership to finalize plans and begin the enrollment process. Both areas are contact-intensive and involve multiple touchpoints.
The challenge
When Blaine joined Stride he inherited a team that operated in a single bucket. “There was no dissemination between skill, priority, or anything,” he recalls, “And everybody is an insurance agent — licensed in all 50 states. It's a really, really expensive agent base.”
With bill rates between $60 and $90 an hour, gaining efficiencies by reducing contacts was imperative for Blaine — especially as Stride was at a place in their trajectory where conversion rates were relatively flat. “The organization very much looks at contact center work as a cost center,” he explains, “So my team’s contribution, if we’re going to give back to the company, has to be done through efficiency gains — otherwise it's not happening.”
The solution
A major part of Blaine’s workload is e-signs — electronic sign-ups to health plans. “That's where a lot of the magic happens with Lang,” he tells us, “Lang AI spends a lot of time, actually all of its time in that e-sign process — at the top of the funnel. It’s where all the interactions happen between my member experience team and the members that are calling up — and this is where you guys have really helped us.”
Using Lang has allowed Stride to handle more contacts, and drive total closures, even before increasing their conversion rate, “The conversion rate is more reflective of our internal system and some of the roadblocks that we still have,” says Blaine, “but thanks to Lang, we have been able to produce more closures with fewer agents.”
Implementation and time-to-value
For Blaine, the value-add that Lang provided was clear early on — and after a year of using Lang Data Operations, he has the numbers to back that up. From increased sales to reduced staffing costs and significant cuts to handling and response times, he attributes much of the progress Stride Health has made to Lang.
One metric stands out — the increase in closures of health plans year-on-year, which Blaine says has paid for Lang several times over on its own. “We did 50% more than the previous year — and that’s a 6x multiplier on our initial investment in Lang,” he calculates.
5 ways Lang has transformed CX at Stride Health
Introducing Lang to Stride has resulted in efficiency gains and cost savings across a range of business activities. Blaine described five key areas where his year-on-year metrics have been positively affected by Lang’s automations.
- Cutting email touches by 21% — even during high demand.
Prior to Lang:
Stride was using Solvvy to do some email deflection, but had to abandon it when it didn’t integrate well with chat. With the busy Open Enrollment Period on the horizon, Blaine was expecting emails to blow up, explaining, “Our touches are high because we have to send a lot of documentation. I was expecting email volume to increase around 30% going into OEP.”
After implementing Lang:
But with Lang automation in place volumes actually reduced — by 21% year over year — which was great for the bottom line. “Email is the most archaic method to sell health insurance plans because there's too much back and forth,” Blaine says, “It's a really expensive contact method — so being able to reduce that was huge for us.
- A 50% increase in health plan closures over the last year.
Prior to Lang:
Blaine’s team of highly qualified insurance agents is expensive to run — and ideally would be focused as much as possible on conversion opportunities. But prior to introducing Lang, they would often get bogged down in minor issues such as password resets, or dashboard requests, rather than handling higher-value interactions.
After implementing Lang:
Lang automations have helped Stride keep agent time focused on closures by handling routine tasks — and it’s really paid off. Even though the conversion rate was flat, Stride closed 50% more health plans this year than previously, representing $180k in total revenue.
- Deflecting 25% of non-conversion-eligible tasks
Prior to Lang:
“There are certain states that have different deadlines for health plans. Like, you can’t close them after a certain day of the month,” Blaine explains, “Before Lang, we’d be in the run-up to a close deadline, and still dealing with other contacts that weren’t time critical — even if we only had 24 h to close on health plans.”
After implementing Lang:
Now, Blaine’s team has around 40 contact reasons that they route through Lang — about 25% of their total. “We’re able to deflect things like dental, vision, welcome packs, those types of questions,” Blaine says, “They get a response, they know there’s going to be a wait because we’re prioritizing health plans. We put them in their own view in Zendesk, and then after the deadline, I can just assign like 20 agents to work that box.”
- Freeing up 10-15 FTEs to focus on conversions.
Prior to Lang:
Stride’s traditionally high-contact funnel, and the fact that all contacts were managed in a single bucket meant that agents were often kept busy dealing with non-essential communications, keeping staffing costs high.
After implementing Lang:
Lang changed that. “This is the first time in Stride’s history that we’re able to prioritize contacts and focus on the health closes — which is 30% of our OEP,” Blaine explains, “Lang saved us about $25k weekly — which translates to between 10 and 15 FTEs who can focus on conversion eligible contacts. That’s about 20% of the workforce.” 5. Big reductions in response and resolution times
5. 43% reduction in response time and 30% lower ACH.
Prior to Lang:
The combination of high contact volume and difficulty triaging and routing tasks, as well as the high proportion of manual work involved for agents, meant that Stride was struggling to bring first response times down much below 11 or 12 hours on average.
After implementing Lang:
With Lang automating key touchpoints, average handling times are down by 30% — falling from 27 minutes last year to 19 minutes currently. And first response times have fallen even more drastically, dropping from 700 to 400 minutes — a total reduction of 43%, or 5 hours in real terms.
Looking to the future
Blaine sees Lang as a key part of his plans to make his team more proactive, this year and beyond — with automation being key. “Probably 90% of my focus will be how we automate the post-purchase experience,” he predicts, “and because I'm not gonna be able to get anything sizable in tooling, it's just gonna be through automations. That's why I'm super excited that we have you guys.”
Specific goals include implementing a multi-tier system to separate out tasks that don’t require a licensed agent to complete — and making use of Lang for transactional interactions post-purchase, like document checks. Blaine also sees Lang as key to Stride’s plan for better segmentation by region — something which does not currently exist.
“So we have relationships with FFM states —federal marketplace states where those are just seamless e-signs,” he explains, “But we have other states that have decided to not use healthcare.gov and done their own thing — those are all very unique. My goal would be to pull those state-based exchanges into their own queue and Lang can help us route that.”
Further down the line, Blaine aims to move to a more predictive model, matching staffing volumes to predicted regional demand, for example, to maximize efficiency in terms of licensing — and he’s adamant that Lang will play a big role in that change, saying “Anywhere I can leverage AI integrations — I'm here for it. That's what Lang has helped us with.”
