Medicare Sales Agency Doubles Contact Rates and Drives Year-Round Enrollment Records

Medicare sales agencies help connect customers to the health insurance and care they need—so long as they’re able to connect with those customers over the phone in the first place. It’s one of the many reasons we take pride in what we do here at Convoso.

We recently sat down with Ariel Ayalon, Operations Manager at Senior Healthcare Advisors, to hear about his team’s journey from struggles to success in the Medicare space after making the switch to the Convoso dialer. It was an inspiring conversation with many lessons for others in the health insurance space.

Read the Senior Healthcare Advisors story for yourself below and learn more about how this Medicare sales agency eliminated huge amounts of leaked voicemails, increased contact rates, and minimized agent wait times to drive success during Annual Enrollment and then all year round.

• Contact rates falling to new lows with Five9 dialer

• Agents reaching and dispositioning a massive number of voicemail messages

• Closing agents experiencing high wait times and low productivity

• Spam Likely labels hurting performance—with no way to see which numbers are affected

• Powerful dialer software capable of handling huge lead volume

• Answering machine detection solution with gold-standard accuracy

• Comprehensive caller ID reputation management platform

• White-glove implementation program and dedicated customer support team

• 2X increase in contact rates

• Agents reach 100X fewer answering machines

• Dialing agents active time increased by over 50%

• Closing agents’ wait times slashed by over 80%

• Enrollment records set during slowest season

"It's an astronomical difference since we switched to Convoso. I would say it's between 50-80% difference in productivity with you guys. It's that big of a number."

With 110 fronters dialing as many as 1,000,000 leads per day, efficiency is the name of the game at Senior Healthcare Advisors (SHA). However, while using the Five9 dialer, Operations Manager Ariel Ayalon says his team couldn’t get around one huge problem: answering machines.

In a given day, his fronters were facing—and having to disposition—as many as 100,000 answering machines. All these voicemails were clogging up their Medicare sales pipeline.

Meanwhile, Spam Likely labels also began to take their toll. But without the right tools for managing DIDs, Ayalon’s team had no way of knowing which numbers were being affected—that is, until a prospect happened to mention it. There’s no telling how many others didn’t pick up because they saw those flagged numbers.

Contact rates fell as low as 6%. SHA’s roster of 50+ closing agents simply waited around, burning through payroll. (Average wait times for closers ballooned to as high as 17 minutes!) And with the all-important Annual Enrollment Period just around the corner, Senior Healthcare Advisors decided it was time to change up their dialer software

“We weren't connecting to people on the phone with Five9. With Convoso, we're seeing a huge difference. It's the fact that more agents are talking on the phone rather than waiting and listening to answering machines.”

Switching to Convoso from Five9, it didn’t take long for Ariel Ayalon to find a new favorite feature. After working over the years with systems like Ytel, Vicidial, and of course, Five9, Ayalon says, above all else, it’s actually Convoso’s answering machine detection that’s most obviously superior.

Trained on millions and millions of calls, our answering machine detection software offers gold-standard accuracy, detecting up to 97% of all voicemail messages. For SHA’s Medicare sales team, the boost in accuracy made all the difference. Rather than facing as many as 100,000 leaked voicemails in a single day, SHA is now seeing as little as 550—and that’s on as many as 1,000,000 calls per day.

Combined with Convoso’s powerful dialer software that delivers industry-leading speed to lead, agents are spending more time on the phone—and more time talking to actual prospects. For their team of fronters, average wait times are down to just 11-13 seconds. That’s an up to 80% increase in active talk time. And it’s making all the difference for SHA’s bottom line.

“The voicemails are nowhere near what we were experiencing with Five9. It's night and day. All my agents now are actually getting connected to people.”

Answering machines were a huge problem with Five9. But they were far from the only one, according to Ayalon. Like so many outbound dialing teams today, SHA was struggling with numbers being labeled as Spam or Scam Likely.

After switching to Convoso, however, his team finally had the tools they needed to take action and boost contact rates.

Using Convoso’s comprehensive caller ID reputation management solution, ClearCallerID™, Ayalon no longer needed to rely on word-of-mouth to find out which numbers were flagged as spam. Instead, he has a dashboard at his fingertips that tells him in real time which numbers are being flagged and by which carriers. With this information, he can now quickly swap out or rest DIDs on the fly.

Not only is he suddenly saving a huge amount of time as a manager, but the entire team is getting a productivity boost: since switching to Convoso, Senior Healthcare Advisors contact rates have doubled.

“We know which DIDs are being flagged and we remove them. Five9 didn’t have this. I didn’t have a way to know what was being labeled spam and what was not.”

A 2X increase in contact rates has kept SHA’s closing agents much, much busier.

Rather than waiting as long as 17 minutes between live transfers, closers are now waiting just 3 minutes. Those are impressive metrics, but we think they’re all the more impressive in practical terms: If your top sales agents had the opportunity to talk to 5 times as many warm leads, how many more sales would you close? That’s the Convoso difference.

Ayalon says this difference was a game-changer for their business, setting them up for a highly successful Annual Enrollment Period (AEP) just months after moving over to Convoso.

However, he said what was even more incredible was the difference the switch in dialer has made during the rest of the year. The Senior Healthcare Advisors team is enjoying success in the months outside AEP that was previously unthinkable.

As the best example of this, Ayalon noted that August is typically a dead zone for most in Medicare marketing and sales. Yet his team drove 275 enrollments in a single August day, setting a new record since last year’s Open Enrollment Period.

“August and September are the slowest seasons when it comes to Medicare, and we just had our best day in the entire year. I credit that to the dialer.”

With just a few months to go before 2022’s AEP, it took a leap of faith for Senior Healthcare Advisors to make the switch to Convoso when they did. But with their early days on the dialer in the rearview mirror, Ariel Ayalon says there’s actually “really nothing to be scared of” when it comes to moving to Convoso.

In large part, this is thanks to Convoso’s hands-on, white glove implementation process.

“As long as you know what you’re doing as far as being confident in your sales process,” he says, “[Convoso] actually does all the work as far as integration.”

Beyond implementation, Ayalon says the top-notch support hasn’t stopped. Over a year into the relationship, the dedicated support and customer success teams continue to be integral to SHA’s continued progress. “Everyone is answering at the drop of a hat,” says Ayalon.

For companies considering a switch to Convoso, “There’s no reason not to pull the trigger and get ready for AEP with Convoso. I don’t know where we would be without this dialer.”