GoHealth is a leading health insurance marketplace and Medicare-focused digital health company whose mission is to improve access to healthcare in America. The company combines cutting-edge technology, data science and deep industry expertise to match customers with the healthcare policy and carrier that is right for them.
GoHealth sells Medicare insurance plans, which are complicated products that can be very confusing for American individuals and families. Small differences between plans can lead to significant out-of-pocket costs or lack of access to critical medicines and even providers. GoHealth’s benefits consultants must educate beneficiaries and explain their options clearly and accurately.
Due to the timing of the Annual Enrollment Period (AEP), when individuals and families can change Medicare providers, GoHealth brings in half its annual revenue in the fourth calendar quarter of each year, resulting in a highly pressured sales period.
GoHealth has strict KPI’s like call quality, call time, conversion percentage, and average handling time. Although the company only hires licensed insurance representatives, many new hires previously worked independently and were not used to being part of a larger team.
“The way that our agents sell insurance is sort of different from how agents might have done it previously. We’re very strict in the way we do things, you can’t just wing it,” says Jay Fortuna, VP of Learning and Organizational Development at GoHealth.
On top of that, benefits consultants have to hit compliance scorecard requirements. If they don’t, they could lose permission to sell that insurer, a situation that Fortuna compares to Travelocity becoming unable to sell seats on American Airlines flights.
GoHealth trains anywhere from 1,000 to 6,000 new hires each year to handle both growth and personnel turnover. Talent can vary immensely and agents have to master a great deal of knowledge as well as the sales skills needed to conduct sensitive and complex conversations.
Their existing process involved dozens of sales trainers working with small groups of trainees, was expensive and labor-intensive, and didn’t enable each agent to practice sufficiently before starting to sell.
The initial, highly successful pilot with Second Nature’s AI training solution in Q4 2022 made it “an immediate no-brainer” according to Fortuna. The company measured sales rates 10 days before and 10 days after the pilot training, and compared the numbers. It found a total top-line increase of $40,000-$50,000 and an average 21% increase in sales, after approximately 34 minutes of training with Second Nature. As a result of the pilot, GoHealth signed a long-term contract to deploy Second Nature both for onboarding new hires, and for ongoing training for existing benefits consultants.
Several hundred benefits consultants used the platform regularly as soon as it was introduced, and an additional 1,500 joined them a few months later. GoHealth uses Second Nature’s AI-powered role play partners for practicing sales conversations and for daily, weekly, and final knowledge checks.
Every agent receives four hours of continuous education development each week between April and October, and Second Nature has been integrated into that program, with AI role plays built into their training courses.
As well as:
Before introducing Second Nature, GoHealth’s highly structured onboarding program was nine weeks, involving six weeks of training and three weeks of practice calls. Now practice calls are integrated into the training process and onboarding takes four weeks and counting. That’s a 55% time saving that allows new hires to start making effective calls five weeks earlier than before.
GoHealth found that its trainers were often reluctant to give accurate feedback in a public setting, out of concern that they would sound too harsh and cause distress to the trainees. It was hard to ensure consistent feedback across different trainers. Second Nature brought a private and standardized way to deliver vital feedback, making it consistent, timely, and objective.
Additionally, each benefits consultant receives this information directly from the system, making them more open to correction and removing the anxiety around completing role plays. “Feedback is a gift that helps us grow and adapt,” says Fortuna. “Second Nature provides a safe place for feedback where a learner could practice their skills.”
With more consistent feedback, training also became more scalable, which is crucial for a company that regularly onboards thousands of new hires at a time.
Training classes used to have a ratio of eight new hires to each trainer, so there was a limit to how many practice role plays and how much feedback each trainer could provide. With Second Nature, GoHealth needs just two trainers for every 40 trainees, and agents can carry out seven times the number of role plays with the same amount of training resources. “This increased efficiency and capacity is saving us a ton of money,” Fortuna says
Role playing is key for helping benefits consultants master new behaviors. Before Second Nature, new hires worked with each other as role play partners when a trainer was not available. “It was like the blind leading the blind,” Fortuna notes.
Now, Second Nature role play avatars serve as expert role play partners who guide each agent accurately.
“Working with Second Nature gives you confidence. It doesn’t matter what the person on the other end of the line says in a live call, you know you can respond because you’ve gone over it time and time and time again,” says Fortuna.
Fortuna and his colleagues at GoHealth are full of plans for ramping up Second Nature usage. Next steps include rolling out a simulation for team managers to boost leadership, applying Second Nature to the most egregious QA fails, and using Second Nature for certification purposes.
Expectations around Second Nature are high. “We’re not just saving time, we’re also seeing faster productivity resulting in more profit,” says Fortuna, adding “We now have so much confidence in our model, I’ve essentially committed to a higher standard of onboarding this year.”
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