BCBS of MN keeps customer service healthy with OpTier

As Minnesota’s largest provider of health insurance, Blue Cross Blue Shield needs to be in constant contact with its customers. Timely responses online and through the call center are critical to customer satisfaction.

“The results were remarkable from the moment we installed OpTier’s solution”
-Dave Thomas, Senior Director of Technology Operations

After looking at many vendors in the application performance and systems management spaces, OpTier was selected. Upon installation, OpTier's Business Transaction Management™ (BTM) solution, CoreFirst®, immediately proved to be the clear choice for Blue Cross. It was the only product that provided easy-to-use, real-time, end-to-end transaction monitoring with the low overhead Blue Cross required in a production environment.

OpTier immediately provided Blue Cross with the opportunity to improve service to its customers. How? By delivering complete visibility into applications at the individual transaction level, giving Blue Cross insight into performance at all tiers in the technology stack.

Dave Thomas is Senior Director of Technology Operations at BCBS of MN. In a concerted effort towards continuously improving customer service in the company's call center, Thomas and his team had been searching for a way to further reduce the amount of time it takes for operators in the Blue Cross call center to query back-end systems for customer information such as looking up benefit policies and the status of claims benefits.

The challenge Thomas faced was that different components could slow down the system at different times, making problem solving difficult. Efforts at reproducing the issue pulled people from other priorities, yet never yielded the necessary insights. What Thomas needed was a solution that tracked transaction flow end-to-end, in order to quickly determine exactly where and why bottlenecks might occur.

OpTier Makes a House Call

Business Transaction Management was a concept Thomas and his staff had been considering for over a year. One of Thomas' colleagues discovered an article about OpTier in InfoWorld. Highly intrigued, though also skeptical, he contacted the company. Thomas recalls, "We thought the concept was great. We just didn't think OpTier could do what they said they could."

"OpTier's BTM solution completely opened up our view of applications by allowing us to see all transactions and what those transactions were doing within the various tiers, from a response time and resource perspective," explained Thomas.

Moreover, the OpTier product installed easier and worked faster right out of the box, showing immediate results.

Insights Leading to Immediate Results

"CoreFirst was up and running from day one, giving us useful data," Thomas noted. During the proof of concept, it highlighted application behavior that the Blue Cross teams had completely forgotten about. Thomas continued, "The results were remarkable from the moment we installed OpTier's solution." Now Thomas and his team had a degree of visibility and metrics previously unavailable to them. They could actually see where specific transactions were going and exactly what kind of performance profile they were exhibiting.

CoreFirst automatically discovers the full transaction flow
 to visualize transaction behavior and identify bottlenecks

During the quality assurance process with OpTier, Blue Cross launched a marketing campaign that drove more traffic to their website. Now they had a tool in place to enable more valuable troubleshooting. OpTier's BTM software made it possible for Blue Cross to discover a culprit that had previously eluded them: a very expensive query during the login process on their website. The development team tuned the code and was able to make remarkable improvements mid-campaign while keeping the system up and running for their customers.

Blue Cross' initial intention was to use the OpTier product in development to set baselines prior to production rollout, but the developers also recognized the product's potential to improve their testing.

In terms of customer satisfaction, CoreFirst delivered a huge ROI. And, thanks to OpTier, the development process received a booster shot: Development teams identified the top 10 most expensive transactions in their respective applications and used them as a baseline for improvements for future release cycles.

No Second Opinion Required

What makes OpTier's BTM solution so valuable to Blue Cross is its ability to look at every transaction, providing a clear picture of what is happening on every tier. It was a capability that Thomas and his staff simply didn't have before. Now Thomas and his team have peace of mind. Becuase CoreFirst tracks all transactions, across all tiers, all the time, they know that changes in application behavior are detected before they can become serious issues.

All told, these are exciting possibilities for Blue Cross, enabling them to deliver a consistent level of quality service to customers. The different IT teams have been quick to embrace the new solution and incorporate it into their workflow. "We didn't have to do any selling. CoreFirst sold itself," said Thomas. "Though now it's starting to bite us. Everyone keeps asking, 'When can we get that?'"

About OpTier

Businesses run on transactions. The best way to manage IT, from a business perspective, is to manage transactions.

OpTier makes software for companies whose business depends on mission-critical transactions.

Our Business Transaction Management™ (BTM) software, CoreFirst®, provides the highest level of application performance and availability, by helping IT assure the quick and successful execution of end-user transactions and prevent problems.

CoreFirst's Active Context Tracking™ (ACT) technology delivers end-to-end visibility of all business transactions, across all tiers, all the time. This unique ability allows IT applications and operations teams to isolate and resolve performance issues faster than ever before, using far fewer resources. The combined effect of our transaction visibility and problem resolution capabilities simplifies the incredibly complex world of IT management and reduces cost and risk.

For more information, email us at info@optier.com or visit www.optier.com.