Sana Benefits Case Study

OVERVIEW

Sana Benefits is a comprehensive benefits provider that brings self-funded plans and fair- market healthcare pricing to the nation’s 28 million small businesses. The company was experiencing growth rates that doubled the size of its customer base every year, so it needed a solution that could help scale its customer success (CS) organization to effectively serve customers without hiring more customer success managers (CSMs).

nCloud Integrators assisted Sana Benefits with its Gainsight Essentials Plus implementation. Grant Reeves, VP of Customer Operations, discusses how the company streamlined the renewal process and incorporated automation to enable CSMs to spend more time proactively managing customers.

CONTEXT

Sana Benefits wanted to scale its CS function and reduce what they call “Cost to Serve.” The goal is to reduce the Cost to Serve by 20 percent while maintaining the same level of service and customer interaction.

“As a company, we are growing very quickly, and we traditionally hire new CSMs based on our customer growth. So, with X number of new customers, we hired a new CSM. However, with our current growth rates, this was not a sustainable business model,” states Grant Reeves, VP of Customer Operations with Sana Benefits. “We wanted to make our CS function more scalable and efficient without hiring new CSMs, so we decided to find a tool that could help usaccomplish this, and that tool was Gainsight.”

nCloud integrators assisted Sana Benefits in helping CSMs proactively manage customer relationships by using Gainsight to incorporate automation while maintaining personal interactions throughout the customer journey.

KEY CHALLENGES

The company’s initial focus was on the renewal process.

“Each of our CSMs were spending 20 to 30 minutes per customer renewal, which is a repetitive, administrative process,” continues Reeves. “Let’s say one CSM has 100 renewals this month, and is spending 20 minutes per renewal. Automating this process saves a CSM 2,000 minutes per month out of the gate. nCloud Integrators helped us quickly streamline our renewal process so we could see an immediate time to value with Gainsight, and at the same time, provide more value-added interactions with our customers.”

Also as a health care payer, Sana Benefits has a very seasonal business. Open enrollment is in January, and then October through December is busy. This year with its continued growth, the company is going to be faced with unprecedented volume during this last quarter.

“We now have a solution that helps us solve for much of this seasonality by incorporating automation into our administrative activities,” states Reeves.

THE SOLUTION

When Sana Benefits implemented Gainsight, nCloud helped unlock the ability to manage

customer health and automate customer journeys, allowing Sana Benefits to scale its customer

success function and more efficiently support customers.

“We were at a point in our company's growth where we needed to innovate to support our customers with technology and a tool like Gainsight. Customer success is changing to a more scaled model versus a one-to-one or one-to-mini,” states Reeves. “CSMs have a larger book of business, so we needed to make them more efficient without losing the personalization and level of support. nCloud Integrators helped us implement Gainsight in a way that is enabling us to find the right balance.”

In addition, nCloud Integrators assisted Sana Benefits in building a health score with five or six

metrics that indicate renewal likelihood. Some of these were pulled from data metrics stored in

various systems and others were manual inputs. All of this data was merged into one comprehensive health score so CSMs could unlock insights to track and manage renewal opportunities and take specific actions based on each customer’s score.

“Gainsight is a very robust tool, so there were times when we would get stuck, and nCloud was able to find creative solutions,” states Reeves. “Our core business model is probably a lot different than a lot of other organizations that use Gainsight. nCloud helped us apply the basic functionality of Gainsight to things like claims, enrollments and other processes within health claims administration. We were able to translate business rules and utilizations to create Calls- to-Action that made sense for our organization. Without nCloud’s help, we would have been in the dark.”

NEXT STEPS

“We love Gainsight so much that we purchased five more seats to help manage the entire post- sales customer experience, which includes onboarding, open enrollment, customer success and renewals. Now we will work on getting our implementation team into Gainsight.” states Reeves.

Once Sana Benefits has its entire post-sales team of 25 up and running on Gainsight, it will

develop additional functionality depending on what will have the biggest impact. To determine

this, the company’s product and finance team study post-sales resource use and how much

time is spent on various activities.

“We will continue to iterate based on where we can save the most time for our team by automating manual, repetitive processes,” continues Reeves.