Health Connector call center disconnect

Insurance portal recovers after ‘bad stumble’

The Health Connector took a “bad stumble” as it transitioned to a new call center vendor this week but has since diagnosed and addressed the problem that created access hurdles for members, the agency’s director said.

“We are back. We have commenced inbound operations. Calls are coming into agents,” executive director Louis Gutierrez told the Connector board. “We have a long queue of callbacks that we intend to make.”

With the goal of improving its customer service, the Connector Board in June approved an agreement with the vendor Accenture for call center planning and design work over the summer.

Last Friday evening, the Connector began the transition and data migration from its prior call center vendor, with agents scheduled to receive incoming calls as of 8 a.m. Tuesday.

But early Tuesday, Gutierrez said, the Connector “began experiencing trouble accepting inbound member calls,” for reasons that were then unknown, and the problems remained into Wednesday morning. On Tuesday, the Connector posted a customer service alert advising that its call center was “experiencing technical issues impacting agents’ ability to answer calls at this time” and that a tech team was “working quickly to resolve the issues.”

Gutierrez said Accenture worked with its vendor partners, Amazon Web Services and Salesforce, throughout Tuesday night and identified “a root cause and resolution” by noon Wednesday.

The stumble comes a year after the Connector was embroiled in a fullblown customer service crisis with another vendor, a situation that led the state authority to engage with Accenture on remedies.

Figures presented Thursday show more than 260,000 people are enrolled in qualified health plans through the Connector, which serves as a clearinghouse available to people in Massachusetts to shop for health insurance if they do not receive it through an employer or otherwise need coverage.

The cause of the latest issues, Gutierrez said, had not been discovered in multiple rounds of high-volume testing and was related to “very complex interactions between certain calling features, the interactive voice response system and usage volumes.”

As of Wednesday afternoon, inbound call center operations were stable and agents were receiving calls, Gutierrez said.