PegaWorld 2025: Excellus BlueCross BlueShield: Transforming Customer Experience with Pega + AI

PegaWorld 2025: Excellus BlueCross BlueShield – Transforming Customer Experience

And welcome to Cognizant Excellus Blue Cross Blue Shield presentation on transforming customer Experience with Pega and AI.

We welcome you all.

Um, I just wanted to, um, talk a few words, um, about, uh, Cognizant.

And then we'll move to the agenda.

Okay, so today what we are planning to cover is, uh, we are planning to cover about the success story of, uh, the Pega Customer Service journey at Excellus.

We will talk about what was Excellus BCBS objective and, um, what was the pain points? How did they bring Pega in the landscape? What was the intent of bringing Pega into the picture to be part of their success journey? And what have they accomplished till date and what are the next steps? What is there in their roadmap? How are they planning? Big on AI and stuff? And we'll also talk about the technical solution and architecture, and what are the best practices and lessons learned from the two major releases that Excellus BCBS had.

And then we also have an interesting testimonials from the users.

And also the VP of Customer Service from Excellus BCBS are very happy to share that as well.

And then finally we'll end up with Q&A session.

Okay.

So just about Cognizant, as you know, Cognizant is one of the premium platinum partners of R Pegasystems.

We're very honored and happy to mention that Cognizant received the Global Partner of the year for For 2025 for our accomplishments in innovation and transformation.

Um, specifically regarding the customer service journey.

Right.

I just want to highlight about our credentials with respect to Cognizant customer service transformations.

Right.

We have done close to 30 plus customer service implementations globally, serving millions of customers and out of which eight Healthcare customers.

We have done major transformation initiatives in customer service. Right? We have helped them uh, to, you know, meet their KPIs and bring in a lot of improvement and efficiencies and bring a huge transformation globally.

Okay.

And I just want to highlight one differentiator what Cognizant does.

Uh, with 26 years of Pega partnership and experience and in implementing major transformation, uh, implementations in customer service, we have a lot of lessons learned, solution accelerators and other best practices that are Pega competency, and our micro CEOs have defined bringing into every engagement we were able to do a flawless, seamless delivery.

And that is a testimonial that you're going to hear from our client as well.

Very happy and proud to invite and to share our excellent customer service journey.

I invite Todd Milillo, our Pega Customer Service Director, and he also owns the Process Innovation taught.

Over to you.

Thanks, dev.

So, um, as dev said, I'm Todd Milillo.

I'm the director of Customer service, Technology and Process innovation at Excellus Blue Cross Blue Shield.

So we're a nonprofit health plan serving the communities in upstate New York.

Uh, over 31 counties.

We're actually the largest commercial payer in upstate New York.

Um, and one of the things that's really important here on this slide is our mission statement.

Um, it's really I'm going to read it out loud because it means a lot and that's how we operate.

It's so to help people in our communities live healthier and more secure lives through access to high quality, affordable healthcare.

And that high quality, affordable healthcare is really one of the things to be thought about in this Pega journey.

How do we provide that? How do we make it so we have a product that's scalable, so we're not passing a cost on and keep our costs down for our members.

So like every journey, it always starts off at the first step.

And we had a legacy system. So I'm sure a lot of you in this room have legacy systems or had them.

And at the time this legacy system aged I should say, did not age like Mark McGrath of sugar Ray.

He looked great yesterday.

Our system didn't.

So, um, if you asked our advocates, what do you think of this system? It was home built.

It was on prem, and there probably wouldn't have been a single one that said, let's change it.

It was built for them.

But when you look at our organization, it wasn't going to support our future needs.

It wasn't scalable, it didn't integrate with other systems.

So that's why we decided to go on a journey and say, it's time to move into a different foundation, to build out and and meet our goals.

So we came together and said, if we're going to do this, what is our value drivers? What do we want to show when it's all said and done? So the biggest thing we wanted to see is can we improve the member experience? Can we improve the advocates experience? Can we make their life easier? Can we really reach out with an omnichannel support? Um, bring us up so we can have many ways to contact our members and they can reach us, um, and give us the ability, as things are changing to be future thinking use.

I use the new technologies, use the new stuff that's coming that we wouldn't be able to do if we didn't move.

So with all this said, we spent weeks or probably months and months going through.

What do we want out of this, uh, this new system and how are we going to go about doing it? And we looked at all the options out there.

And as everyone can probably guess, we landed on Pega.

So some of the things that Pega really differentiated itself for us is the ability to do the end to end automation.

When we looked at what we could do from end to end workflows, process workflows, how that would set us apart, the predictive capabilities, the flexibility and scalability.

This was really important to us because we wanted something that we could build a foundation and grow it.

As the use cases came as new products come out, um, as we wanted to change our landscape of training and the way we communicate with our members.

Pega offered that for us, real time AI and automation. So we saw where Pega was going on the roadmap and how we could leverage this and United Unified Platform.

We needed it to integrate with our core systems.

We have to make sure it works with other areas of the organization that we didn't just build in a silo, and it had to have its connection to everything to create that single pane of glass.

So then we started and this project started with its success factors.

And what do we want to deliver? So it started off with a discovery session.

We were probably about three months with business users, our technical partners, um, SMEs from inside the business.

Our Cognizant partners helped drive this discovery sessions where we understood where were we coming from, this legacy system that people loved.

We didn't want to lose what was there, but we wanted to make sure that we future proofed ourselves to to grow onto something new.

So during that time, we spent a full, full discovery on everything we wanted to do and we laid it out.

Then from there we said, for this to be successful, how are we going to measure it? So we need to make sure that all of our metrics, standard metrics, stayed the same.

We wanted to create this single pane of glass.

How can we stop our advocates from going through all these systems? Where can the data be brought to them? So that was one of the big success factors.

A key driver making sure that all the data was brought to one place.

We also wanted to make sure that we had automation opportunities.

So using some of the automation features on top of our tool brought more efficiencies.

Um, then the last thing we were looking at too is the accuracy and quality.

So we couldn't afford to have our members be impacted by our process, by our systems.

So seeing our quality remain the same and remain at that level was extremely important.

And after all that was done, we released our system and it was when it was out.

We trained our advocates over the next few months, and now we have all of our medical products are now working in Pega, in production, Our pharmacy and dental lines are going to be being brought on to Pega in the next few months. So it was a big transformation that we did over all this time to move our whole call center onto this new platform.

The other thing we did during this time is we released our new system.

So we had two major projects that everybody was touching those systems on a day to day basis, and we put them together.

We integrated them to create a single pane of glass so that from our advocate's perspective, they were not seeing multiple things to flip around.

They get their calls.

They could do that in Pega.

They can bring it up and get those efficiencies.

So all this was to build our foundation that takes us to the next level.

And I'm going to turn this over to Ashish who's going to talk through that.

Thanks, Todd.

Hey, I'm Ashish Kumar Principal Software Engineer with Excellus.

As Todd mentioned that we have, uh, we choose Pega because of because we want to build a roadmap how we want to serve our customers.

Then the main point is like how to give a 360 view of all the other cases or all the other, uh, how the member is interacting to us.

That's why we what we are doing as a next step, we are integrating with the multiple workflow applications.

So, uh, whenever a customer calls us so they can see a holistic view, how many cases are open for that member.

Then also as part of our next steps, we are doing a clear journey to like so that we can offer the next best action to the customers.

As you see that our integration is also in our next steps as well as the GenAI Voice AI capability.

Knowledge Buddy all is this as part of our next steps? In terms of our technical solution and architecture? This is how we have designed it.

like with the Pega API is kind of like our backbone, I would say.

So how we are using all the Pega out of the box features to integrate these two systems.

So and we'll keep on using the same APIs to create the cases here so that the customers can. Sorry.

The customer reps can see, uh, everything uh, in the system as a 360 view.

I'll hand it over to Todd for the next.

So through all this.

Thank you.

We're now live with our first release of Pega.

And there was a lot of lessons learned.

Best practice that we came across as we went.

Um, so sharing that some of the stuff that was really successful for us, I want to call out our discovery phase that 15 weeks that I was talking about, well spent.

We came out of that session with a full product or project plan that we were able to keep to over 18 months on schedule, on budget.

We knew what we were going to deliver and it really set us up for success.

Um, so the planning up front is so critical to moving anything onto the Pega system, and it really pays for itself in the end.

The other thing that we did as an organization is when you looked at Pega, we wanted everything.

We wanted the whole roadmap at once, but we systematically said, let's do this in, um, MVPs.

I know it's an overused term, but the first phase was how do we replace our current system with at least the same functionality and a little more than we had out there, and that's our foundation, because we knew if we could build that foundation, we could scale it.

We could then increment and grow it.

So we really scoped it into that range to get us in a spot where we could be successful long term.

We then planned out our next MVP releases.

Um, where do they go? The second, second one really brought on more lines of business that were never on our legacy system.

But they are now.

Our third and fourth are going to change or change the way that we're doing our communication, outbound communication with our members.

How do we integrate more of the AI features, um, integrate more CDH and next best action. So really breaking this apart so that our roadmap matches our company strategies and we're not looking at the whole thing at one time.

We did run into some challenges though.

Like I mentioned, we were putting our cast system in at the same time as our Pega implementation, and originally they were going to be about six months apart.

But projects changed, timelines change, and ended up being about two weeks apart.

So a lesson learned there that we had is we really need to put more time between these projects.

From a change management perspective, our advocates were in the middle.

Everything they touch was changing in a matter of a couple of weeks, and the training to bring them on board became a very large challenge.

We also ran into integration with our caucus system.

Another lesson learned is to really create that seamless, seamless interactions on Pega and our caucus system.

It took longer than we expected, so we had to just have more time.

We had to work with our partners.

But, um, that'll get us there or that got us there.

The other really big factor that we did that really helped us be successful in the end is our UAT process.

So inside of our UAT, um, we really didn't have a formal UAT process until the Pega project.

And we took the things that worked for testing from an IT technical feature that has robust testing strategies.

And we said, how do we use this inside the business? So we brought in, um, test plans.

So we created a UAT test plan of the who, the what, the how, the when are we going to test this to validate that it works? We had advocates coming in from the very start and their test cases were how do they do their job day to day.

So we documented their day to day test cases of how the system has to act for them.

We got them in the system as soon as we could executing these test cases.

And that flushed out a lot of the usability issues.

Any, um, defects came out.

It was all done up front. And when it was all said and done, we went to production with zero known defects in our production environment.

So a really big testament, and I want to give a shout out to Paddy Kenny, who really helped lead the effort.

And then this the strategic system upgrades and planning.

So now that we have our foundation there, we've already done an upgrade on our Pega system.

If we plan when it's going to happen, we knew where it was and it was very easy, efficient because it all goes into our long term strategy where we plan this out over the next few months.

So once again, it was very smooth and easy to do.

And the last thing I want to call out is how we prioritize this.

I mentioned it before, but when we have an organizational vision and strategy, we really put our roadmap together to align with it.

We can't do everything at once.

It wouldn't work.

So when we look at what we're trying to accomplish as a company, as an organization to support our members, that breaks out our MVPs, that's our releases.

So as much as we want everything at once, we're able to really prioritize based on the orgs need and our strategic priorities.

So I know I just talked a lot about the project, how we got on Pega, but we put together a video from the people who use it.

So there's going to be three presenters here.

Um, our vice president of customer care, we're going to have our manager who leads our training and quality program, and one of the advocates who uses Pega every day to support our members, and each of them are going to give a perspective of the system, how it impacts them and what they see from it.

My name is Brittany.

I am a senior advocate, one with the Care Select pod, and I have been with the company for four years now.

I think with the day to day with Pega, what we've seen the most of is that the streamlining of benefits, I think is a huge thing that we're we see less and less errors.

Um, and it makes the streamlining of giving the benefit a little bit clearer to both the member and the provider. So the efficiency of getting the data and then the streamlined process of giving the data back to both the provider and the member is a lot clearer to them.

Again, I like the benefits feature, but one of the other features that I really do enjoy is the verbal authorization feature, where when we authenticate a member or someone calling on behalf of a member, we're able to add that verbal authorization on file showing who called in that day, and it will show for the remainder of the day.

I am Kayla Robinson and I'm the manager of Onboarding Solutions for Customer care, and I've been with the organization for going on 11 years.

Uh, implementing Pega has been a game changer for our training department.

The platform has really streamlined our process, making them simpler and more efficient.

Uh, as a result, we've been able to improve our training delivery, allowing us to focus more on engaging our learners and digging deeper into the more complex topics that we have in our lesson plans.

Pega truly has enhanced our ability to provide high quality training, and we couldn't be happier with the results.

Hi, my name is Alex Lovy and I am the Vice President of Customer Care for the Excellus Blue Cross Blue Shield Health Plan.

I have responsibility for all the contact centers across all lines of business, and Pega has been a super fantastic tool for us.

We've seen benefits in average handle time, we've seen benefits to our quality, and we've seen benefits to our advocate engagement due to a more simplistic system, while allowing them to meet the needs of our customers and providers.

Why is Pega important to us is because we are aiming at a personalized, compassionate experience for our members where we navigate the system for them, not the other way around.

And Pega's ability to bring disparate data together into one screen for our advocates to use to navigate our members is just such a critical part of our strategy, and we're very excited for where it's going.

Thank you Todd.

Ashish, for sharing your success story.

Really inspiring and we wish you all the best for your future roadmap and accomplishments.

We'll soon come back to discuss about the other AI related implementations very soon in PegaWorld.

Thanks a lot! We are ready for Q&A. Um, so there is a mic set up.

Anyone would like to ask any questions? Hi, my name is Bob Kane.

I'm a partner for, uh, for Pega, and I was wondering if you could go into some of the details around the key issues and integration that you had to perform in order to make this success a reality? Yeah.

Um, so two things really came in as issues.

One was our project timelines, which collided.

But one of the issues we had with CAS is getting the integration for Screen Pops to work.

So if a member calls in, um, to pop the members information in Pega, that's the goal we wanted to get to.

And where the issue came is it worked for phone calls.

But then if our advocates were using chat, then it wouldn't.

It wouldn't work for both.

So it was a lot of custom configuration to get the chat feature, to allow the cars to work seamlessly with screen pops inside our system.

Um, and that we work with our partner, we work with Pega, we work with Cognizant.

And it just it clear up the technical hurdles to have that work.

Otherwise we'd lose member interactions inside our chat and an advocate would never see it pop up inside a Pega.

Alternative.

Solution.

Yep.

So the question is, if we evaluated cache solutions and which one did we end up on? So yes, we did, we did uh, we tried we evaluated a few of them.

We landed on Genesis.

So we're on the Genesis cloud.

Now.

And we had to go through a little bit.

We had to go through a little bit back and forth. Yeah.

And we worked with Matt and we have a very close connection for the Pega team of engineers.

So it was specifically for a very particular problem, what we faced.

But it is relevant now.

I know in the roadmap they're providing the webhooks.

Instead of going through all this it will be far more easier.

So we were talking about that.

That would be the next thing to basically come out of and build it.

Thank you.

I just have a couple questions.

Um, I see that you're using Genesis.

Um, are you already using Voice AI or is that to come? That's to come.

So we're going to be trying that out in the next over the next couple of months.

The Voice AI features.

So we've already seen the proof of concepts.

We're going to be trying it on our core system, but it's coming for us in the next few months.

So I don't have the quick timeline yet.

Are you using are you going to use that to connect the how are you going to get that connectivity for Genesis? Yeah.

So.

I guess let me clarify why I'm asking.

Yeah, I think I think that is the question I was telling, right, that right now that is the availability.

But I think in the next version they're already provided.

It's GA, which is using webhooks.

So that is I think that would be the plan.

Uh, and Ashish, you can actually probably. That's so we are on version.

So uh, we are planning it as part of 25 because in 25 we'll get a direct integration with Genesis.

So we need to upgrade our system and then get out of the box capability of it.

So you will use the Pega call summarization feature over the Genesis call summarization.

Yes.

We need a hook.

Yeah, we need to.

That's how we are going to connect after upgrading our system.

Do any of your users use VDI or do they all have laptop like desktops laptops.

They all have desktops or laptops at home.

Yep.

Okay.

And we're a remote workforce.

Okay.

And we're also going to, you know, make use of Voice AI Maantic AI as well, which is a new capability getting released in a month or so.

And it has pretty cool features.

And we are just, you know, playing around with it to see how we can implement it as well.

Okay.

As part of the roadmap.

Actually any any knowledge sharing, we can definitely share about our experience and all.

Okay.

Thank you.

Yeah.

Hello.

What type of data management activities did you have to complete to move from your legacy system? And also to integrate the data from some of your other, maybe core systems? So regarding the core systems integration.

So we obviously we have to build everything.

We already have something in the enterprise layer.

So we reuse that because we are already using that enterprise layer in other workflows.

That's how we integrate in the customer service.

We built a couple of services to integrate that system.

And also the validation for all these APIs are already available in our system.

So we just onboarded to Pega.

And just to add to Ashish, it was really like very good job what excellence has in place.

It was robust data dictionary.

So we have almost 100 close to 100 integrations built right.

And it was done in a very small period of time thanks to the robust data dictionary.

It has each and everything well documented about the API, the endpoints, what are the features and capabilities they are providing? Right.

What are the test data availability.

So all those actually helped to build it very quickly and with very minimal number of issues in the non-production.

And as Todd mentioned, production, we did not have any any any defect on that.

That's great.

Thank you so much.

And that was a great question too.

When you look at the data integrity, and that's where having all the core systems making sure Pega pulls in that single pane of glass, it's really critical.

We couldn't lose data.

And when we transition from our legacy system to Pega, we didn't it wasn't an all advocates at one time, so we had to have both systems running at the same time as our other core systems.

But, um, kind of treating it all. They all wrote back to the same core systems at the same time to make that possible.

Just to add like we have like a lot of API's.

So we focused also on the asynchronous processing of the APIs.

So that system will not do all together.

So we'll do it in the back end too.

So that's our that's how we are able to achieve.

Yeah I think you want to highlight that one.

So that was a big uh like advantage.

What Ashish and Cognizant team work together because I think pretty much some of you know, that is one of the major pain point like number of calls, uh, between, uh, call and the initial verification, there are five six, seven different API calls and which each of them, depending on your backend application, may take time.

So all of them are actually moved to asynchronous processing to save time so that you don't actually see that user experience.

They don't need to wait for it.

So by the time they're actually going to the navigate to the next screen already, all those API calls are pulling the data for you.

So that is another one is a big, uh, change which was implemented, which benefited the end user experience really well.

Hey, Todd, thank you very much.

That was a great session.

Quick question with all this Process AI Voice AI, we're seeing a lot of changes in the roles and skills.

So if you can speak a little bit about how we are looking at that, both on the technical side as well as on the user community side.

And what changes are you bringing? How are laying the foundation for role changes or alignments with that? So just make sure you're talking about the skills of the employees, the advocates, what we OK.

On both sides, both technical as well as on the business user side.

Yeah.

So I can start with the business side. So as we bring in more of this, uh, more of the AI features, first thing is not as much of a skill, but we're gonna get more efficiencies.

It's going to be scalable.

When you talk about like voice AI in the summarizations, the wrap up time, the being able to document it's going to drastically reduce, um, but then also supporting from a business, I think understanding the use cases of how the AI works and empowering them to feed ideas into the system.

So to me, it's going to be educating our employees in the business from all levels of this is what the AI technology can do, so that they're feeding ideas because all ideas can't come from one source or a certain team.

It's going to take the the business side to do it.

So I think that's one of the biggest changes.

Um, I don't know if with the technical side of sheesh.

For the Voice AI, we are in the right now in the POC phase, so we want to we have identified the Adult use cases.

How we are going to make this successful.

Like how it's going to benefit more customer reps.

So we are in that phase right now.

And then we are making sure that whatever the customer is asking, it would be like a pop up for a customer rep.

So it would be easy.

Like what are the cancellations and what is the next best action for that member who is calling? Thank you.

Good afternoon.

A couple of questions.

So I don't know what your journey has been from either on prem to the migration to the cloud.

Can you speak a little bit in terms of did you do the coexistence? One question and then follow up on that is from a business standpoint, from a change management standpoint, how did you prep the organization and your CSR to actually adopt the new Constellation UI and how did that work? So we did have both systems at one time.

And the key there is kind of goes back to the data one, we had our core claims payment systems facets. So while we had Pega and our legacy system, they were both writing back to our claim system.

So that's what kind of tied it together, because we transitioned over about 5 or 6 months to get all of our advocates onto Pega.

So during that time, we didn't want to have separate reports we didn't want.

So by using facets that way, it allowed us to transition at our own speed until we were able to support all the training and move them over.

So that's how we handled the transition with two systems at the same time.

Um, it was also interesting during that because you can get different metrics.

So as people are moving, you're still watching both systems.

And it also allowed us time to bring people on, get the feedback.

And if there was anything we were like, hey, if we did this, it'd be better.

We can either slow our training down or speed it up.

Um, so it gave us that flexibility too.

And then the other question on change management, it was large and like I said, two core systems at the same time between Pega and Kara or Genesis at the same time was a lot of change.

So we started off by, um, a lot of communication.

So we brought it to our executive teams giving updates there.

We have inside of the customer care center where most of the impact was going to be felt.

We have monthly town halls, um, monthly or bi monthly.

It changes.

So there'd be presentations on the project when it first kicked off.

Here's what's coming.

And then throughout the time giving updates on where it is.

Demos.

Once UAT started, um, there was demos done in the town hall for everyone to see.

And then the UAT process itself helped us with change agents.

So the advocates that were in there testing were working with their peers, saying, I was just using this and this is how it's working.

So the word of mouth really spread that way too.

So a lot of communication, a lot of demos and just clarity on when it's coming was really the key part.

So lesson learned on that one is probably I would say we probably could communicate even more.

So um, even though we did this, uh, what was interesting is some of our lines of business and our legacy system, they were seem to adopt easier.

But then we had our other lines of business, our dental and pharmacy that did not have that.

Um, so there they weren't as prepped.

So they heard it's coming, but it wasn't a 1 to 1 translation.

So I think even more of that communication on those teams would have been a lot better.

Any other questions? Oh, sorry.

Yeah.

Okay.

Um.

So allow your customer service agents to do claims adjustments.

So they do some.

Keep me honest, Patty.

Yeah.

Yep.

Some, but not a lot.

So the answer is yes at a certain level.

How did you do that? Did.

What was the question? How do you do that? Are you using RPA in the in.

So RPA is used for some of the claims processing, but they do that directly in facets for the advocates level.

So they have to swivel to facets right now. So yeah.

So right now they do.

Um, it's something that we're still looking at like claims information is on our next phase of our roadmap.

And what that'll be is what we're defining as the sessions are going on right now.

Okay.

I'll come back to that.

There's one that's so elaborate.

I think that is one of the differentiator.

Big differentiator is normally we have implemented a lot of customer service implementation, same stack back end facets, front end Pega.

And this is one of the program where we implemented dual sink.

So basically each step basically they dual sink.

So you don't have to basically worry about do something.

It is not available in Pega you do go back in facets and complete it.

It's not it's seamless.

So whatever you're seeing in facets, whatever customer service representative is doing in Pega is dual sink, Think, including each and every interaction.

So in one interaction you have both member provider multiple interaction everything is well synced.

So that is one of the big thing we implemented which is a big differentiator for it.

Okay.

And how how long did you reduce your training time.

So the training time, our first new hire class I want to say they cut, I think it was four days off of the training is what that was.

Um, because until then we've only been doing the upskilling of our current staff.

So there's only been one so far that's gone through.

And I just want to highlight many of the Healthcare customers use facets, uh, for their adjudication. So, uh, from I mean, it's a Cognizant product to, as you know, so we know the data model of facets and we we are we have a strong practice from Pega perspective.

So bringing in both the knowledge we have built in an adapter for integration, it's called intelligent data exchange ADX.

From Blue Shield of California.

Yeah yeah you're using it.

So I just want to let everyone know.

Implemented claims adjustments.

That's why I was asking the question.

Okay, so I was curious if you solution it in a different way.

Yeah, sure.

Thank you.

Yeah.

And on the training thing too, one one thing that brought that down is before we had Pega, we were training on facets a lot of the information.

And now they don't need to train as much facets.

So that's been removed and it's more keep them in Pega for their whole training course.

So it changed the way we train.

And we train a lot less on the facet system for customer care.

Hi.

I'm also from a blue plan and my question was related to the member touchpoint measurements.

You said performance was important and I'd like to ask was there a difference for the first few months of the transition? Did you see a scores fall and then go back to the norm? Yeah, surprisingly our member touchpoints all stayed right around the same.

We didn't really get a dip after the switch.

I'm thinking some of that is due to.

Like I said, we've rolled people over.

It wasn't just one day a switch. We moved people over as we were doing the system, so it was over 5 or 6 months, but we never got a drop in our scores.

The question that I had was about your transition.

Did you have a choice of which line of business was rolled out first? It's a great question and we had a lot of conversations on that.

We ended up mixing it up.

So originally we were thinking line of Business, and then when we were putting the plan together, what we realized is pulling people off the phone for these classes to to upskill them of eight hours.

It would one line of business couldn't support it.

It would it would hurt our, um, hurt our ability to serve our members.

So we ended up settling on moving people based on service levels and capacity.

So we would meet every week, With each line of business and say, who can support training this week? How many can you give? And that's how we'd fill our classes up.

So it was a mix moving through.

Do you have reps who have multiple skill sets? How did you address that situation? Because on our plan we have seekers who are multi-skilled.

They address questions related to different products.

Yeah.

So we did still keep the classes to the line of business.

So like a Medicare class was only a matter of care advocates.

But we didn't say like in January we're going to train all of Medicare.

So it's when Medicare, hey, this week we can afford to do one class.

Then we'd run one class of all Medicare.

So the classes were still individualized for that reason.

One last question.

Your CAS implementation and the Pega Customer Service module.

If you had an opportunity to redo what you did, would you have launched okay, I shouldn't ask.

That's a direct question. What would be your preference? You know what would be your recommendation? CAS versus customer service integration.

So probably CAS first.

That's how it was on our roadmap.

Um, and it seemed like an easier transition was less change for the agents, but it was introducing it.

So that was our plan.

We thought we'd have about a six month window.

The CAS project is what delayed and crunched it up.

So if anything, a lesson learned is allow more time.

Um, we were really tied though, because our CAS implementation slowed down.

We also had a goal, an organizational goal to have Pega up by the end of the year so that one didn't couldn't move back.

So as one moved, we combined them.

Thank you very.

Much.

Any other questions? Before I wrap up, I want to really thank Todd Ashish for sharing your success story.

Um.

Cognizant works out of in three in a box model.

Definitely.

This success wouldn't have been possible without the collaboration between Pegasystems, Cognizant and Exelis.

Excel is both business and IT stakeholders.

They have been so supportive and collaborative with us and definitely from Cognizant end.

I just want to give a shout out to our Pega competency micro COE of customer service within Cognizant.

They shared with us a lot of best practices lessons learned, which really helped us, uh, to make our customers be successful. So and to audience to you all for being very interactive, uh, and making this a successful presentation.

Thank you so much.

Please stop by our booth if you have any additional questions regarding this implementation, we'll be happy to go over in detail about this.

Okay.

Thanks everyone.

Thank you.

Everyone.

Thank you.