CUSTOMER PROFILE
CVS Caremark, part of CVS Health, is a pharmacy benefit manager with 6,500+ agents across their contact centers. Facing schedule and workload misalignment challenges due to a time-consuming manual request process, CVS Caremark turned to NiCE’s Employee Engagement Manager (EEM). The tool was rolled out in phases and focused heavily on agent training. Agent satisfaction increased substantially, and workforce managers had time to be more analytical and consultative. Agents now say they stay in their roles at CVS Caremark because other contact centers don’t use EEM.
01 THE BEFORE
A disengaged workforce and time-consuming, manual scheduling requests
Operating 24/7, CVS Caremark is a critical part of the CVS Health family. CVS Caremark is a pharmacy benefit manager that works with employers, health plans, unions, and state and local governments to manage prescription plans. The company’s contact centers, with a workforce of over 6,500 agents and staff, work with members of CVS Caremark’s plans to troubleshoot and understand offerings and benefits. Nearly threequarters of the team work from home. Call arrival patterns are distinct, with calls surging in the morning and tapering at certain points in the afternoon and night.
Historically, the contact centers have lacked scheduling flexibility as changes and requests relied on manual processes through SharePoint or WebStation. Given the known call patterns, this created frequent misalignment between agent schedules and workload. The previous scheduling process took extra time due to the need for submission and review by agents, supervisors, and workforce management analysts. This resulted in disengaged agents and ineffective use of workforce capacity.
02 DESIRE TO CHANGE
Moving to a proactive state and building more flexibility
CVS Caremark already used NiCE solutions but was not taking advantage of all the tools in the platform, including Employee Engagement Manager (EEM). Chris Meehan, Director of Workforce Scheduling at CVS Caremark, saw a clear connection between workforce capacity challenges and agent engagement levels and knew a change was needed. “Scheduling and the real-time processes we had for requests were often a significant barrier to improving engagement,” he said.
The workforce scheduling team also felt the pinch of being more transactional and addressing scheduling requests as they came in instead of being analytical and forward-looking. The team needed a way to ease the burden of scheduling requests, grant agents more flexibility, and address workforce capacity. Meehan wanted a way to make micro-schedule change adjustments and automate schedule change submissions down to a 30-minute interval to minimize shift overlap and inconsistencies. It was an easy choice for Meehan to turn to EEM and utilize the capabilities already at their fingertips. CVS Caremark tapped NiCE’s Value Realization Services (VRS) to create a new way forward.
03 THE SOLUTION
Phased implementation and ongoing education
With the guidance of VRS, CVS Caremark approached the implementation of EEM in phases. Over three months, EEM access and training were rolled out to individual teams in waves. Each wave focused on a three-step process: system configuration and workforce preparation, colleague communication and training delivery, and configuration optimization. The initial wave focused on senior operational leaders so they could support the socialization of EEM in the ensuing months.
“We started with smaller teams with more tenure first,” Meehan explained. “This started with a session to set up the tool and choose their preferences. We then used EEM’s user guides and videos for training.” This process allowed agents to get into and start using EEM immediately while learning some of the nuances. Meehan and the team ensured they had “opportunities for them to explore” the first time they logged in. Agents received follow-up emails each week showcasing additional features of EEM. This early socialization approach kept the team’s registration rates above the 80% benchmark they set, and CVS Caremark now has 97% of eligible agents fully registered. Daily agent logins remain above 40%.
04 THE RESULTS
Increased engagement and decreased attrition
Right away, agents were excited about using EEM. “We saw people using EEM as one of their home pages, keeping it open all the time,” Meehan said. Based on internal surveys completed after the rollout, engagement and sentiment saw a quick, positive increase. Overall, agent sentiment increased 39.9%, satisfaction with the schedule change process increased 29.7%, and scheduling efficiency improved 17.9%. Most agents, 85.9%, said it was vital that they continue to have access to EEM. Employee retention has also been boosted in a field with a lot of turnover. Supervisors have heard that individuals can do things like take their children to health appointments with much less stress about schedule changes. “We’ve been told agents aren’t interested in looking at other contact centers for roles because those contact centers don’t have EEM,” Meehan said. “Having EEM is one of the reasons our team is staying with us.”
EEM is now handling around 3,800 schedule changes daily for CVS Caremark. This has freed up time for the workforce management team, resulting in a 14% reduction in manual workforce management administrative tasks. Meehan said several job descriptions are now being updated, and some vacant positions retired, as they no longer need to spend a significant portion of their time on those previous manual processes. Supervisors now have time to focus on meaningful quality and performance support rather than administrative tasks.
05 THE FUTURE
More automation and stability
CVS Caremark is primed to keep evolving as a forward-thinking, proactive contact center versus a reactive one. The benefit for members has also been signficiant. “Ultimately, we’re here to answer calls from our members,” Meehan said. “EEM is allowing us to do that with less friction and be consistent with customer experience.”
As an extension of CVS Caremark’s use of NiCE’s broader AI-powered software, EEM will continue to ease agents’ and supervisors’ workloads by intelligently matching schedule change options to individual team members and provide additional rounds of education, including doing an email push spotlighting the swap feature. Meehan also expects to take more advantage of real-time alerting options in EEM, leveraging AI to adjust schedules on the fly. He said this will help eliminate more manual processes and continue to decrease absenteeism among agents. “Long term, this is about creating more stability in the future and allowing us to look even farther ahead,” he said.
