For the 10th year in a row, Service Quality Measurement Group (SQM^®) recognized BlueCross BlueShield of South Carolina and BlueChoice HealthPlan of South Carolina customer service advocates (CSAs) for their superior performances. Thirty-three CSAs received awards.

This year, four of our CSAs were among the top 50 finalists for SQM’s Agent of the Year award. Congratulations to Stacy Small and Kimberly Carree of BlueChoice^® and to Fraser Clifton and Cindy Sovde of State Health Plan. Agent of the Year award finalists must be World Class-certified for customer experience (CX). This means 85 percent of customers are “very satisfied” with the way the agent handled their call. Agents are also selected for the award based on their call centers’ nominations that describe their outstanding performance in customer service.

Another outstanding CSA, Clifton Hardy of National Alliance, won a CSA Top World Class CX Improvement award. He was one of only five CSAs in North America to receive the award. He had a 10 percent or greater annual metric improvement from the previous year and was selected based on his management’s nomination for his outstanding customer service.

In recognition of his leadership, Jesse Epting, vice president of State Health Plan, won the FCR Leadership Award. He is one of only two call center leaders in North America to receive the award this year. This prestigious award recognizes the State Health Plan’s efforts to improve the member experience, particularly in the second half of 2022. This included significant improvements in FCR, call center customer satisfaction, CSA customer satisfaction, low effort scores, World Class calls and resolution rate.

SQM also honors organizations demonstrating best practices that have improved or helped maintain high FCR and customer satisfaction performance.

Medicare Advantage was one of only five organizations in North America to win a FCR Improvement award for its performance in 2022. To qualify for this award, a call center must improve its FCR by at least 5 percentage points. This is the third year in a row that our company has had a winner in this category. Previous winners were State Health Plan and BlueChoice.

This year, our company also won an award for best practices in customer experience. The award honors organizations that have shown they are improving or maintaining high FCR and customer satisfaction performance.

Our company is the sole winner of the first CX Improvement Turnaround award, an award SQM created specifically for our company. This honor celebrates the work our CX team has done to implement changes based on targeted insights, reporting and action planning based on key voice-of-the-customer data points. These changes let CX work with internal partners such as the State Health Plan to improve call center metrics quickly and provide better customer experiences.

The company recently hosted a celebration to honor the SQM award recipients.
 

Here is the full list of CSA award winners:
 

BlueChoice HealthPlan World Class Certified CSA winners
Latonja Boyd
Kimberly Carree
Trina Newton
Mary Ortiz
Stacy Small

FEP World Class Certified CSA winners
Cathyrne Crawford
Kimberly Money
Michaela Shoemake

FEP World Class Certified and World Class Improvement CSA winners
Laura Campbell
Casey Jordan
Aukevia Sutton

Group and Individual World Class Certified CSA winners
Monisha Jacobs
Davonna McGill
Joy Mordecai
Carolyn Scott

Major Group World Class Certified CSA winner
Deadres Woodruff

State Health Plan World Class Certified CSA winners
Cheryl Branham
Sarrah Burroughs
Fraser Clifton
Mykia Perry
Cindy Sovde

State Health Plan World Class Improvement CSA winner
Naomi Greene

Medicare Advantage World Class Certified CSA winners
Chelsea Adams
Donald Crowley
Carl Ellingson
Addie Frederick
Angela Gause
Mercedes Jones
Carmaye Reyes

National Alliance World Class Improvement CSA winners
Tecia Jenkins
Clifton Hardy
Yvette Ross
Lenora Sinkler

Congratulations to all the award winners. Thank you to our customer service employees for all you do for the company and our members!

BlueChoice HealthPlan is an independent licensee of the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association.