This award goes to the organization that uses Slack to provide a higher level of white-glove service and inspire customers to become advocates.
A direct-to-consumer health insurance company, Oscar Health is receiving the Customer Service Award for using Slack to pioneer digital health services and offer its 420,000 members the ultimate customer concierge experience—both before and during the pandemic.
Oscar Health members are not only satisfied with the platform; they’re also satisfied with the service: Oscar’s Net Promoter Score is 36, compared with an industry average of –4 among insurers and 12 for Affordable Care Act providers.
Sebastian Burzacchi, the vice president of service operations at Oscar Health, says the secret to customer satisfaction is white-glove support. Every Oscar member has their own personalized Care Team, which consists of about five care guides and a team of clinical experts. Care Teams are regionalized, and care guides are experts within the member’s area and hospital network.
When an Oscar member has an issue, the Care Team is there to support that person from beginning to end. Behind the scenes, the team uses tiered Slack channels to share knowledge and find answers fast. The tiered channels ensure that service representatives can quickly tap the right people for help.
“In Slack, we can troubleshoot and identify the information needed to answer a question, and this enables us to be more succinct and efficient when responding to members,” Burzacchi says. “Slack allows us to solve issues in almost real time, often with the member on the phone.”
In March 2020, when U.S. health-care systems went into overdrive in response to Covid-19, Oscar was at the forefront of the sprint to start up new services and testing. On March 6, the company released a risk assessment survey and testing center locator for free, public use. Both products launched during shelter-in-place, and most of the strategizing was done in Slack.
“A lot of that rapid-fire collaboration happened within channels, because all of a sudden we were all remote,” says Duncan Greenberg, the company’s senior director of product. “Slack certainly made it easier for us to make decisions quickly and communicate them to everyone who needed to know.”
With Slack as its digital headquarters, Oscar Health scaled up its systems and moved its workforce remote, keeping more than 1,000 employees focused on doing what they do best: innovating to deliver a patient-first experience.
