Icario

Through our partnership with Inside Consulting, we successfully rationalized our third-party vendor strategy, achieved substantial cost savings, and fortified our vendor oversight mechanisms. Together, we've transformed our approach, paving the way for enhanced efficiency and sustainable growth.- Joe DiPaolo | Icario SVP
Inside Consulting absolutely delivered on their promises- they looked beyond the obvious areas and applied keen insights to drive incremental improvements.- Russ Trpkovski | CVC Capital Operating Partner

Situation:

  • Icario faced growing member engagement costs from print and call center services, leading to margin stagnation. The business was a combination of three legacy businesses, each with similar focus areas but distinct technology platforms and service providers.
  • The business used a combination of outsourced service providers and internal staff for these functions.

Insights and actions:

  • Icario could maintain operational resilience while aggregating volume with one key print partner. The volume aggregation would confer significant price savings (36%) after competing the business in a multi-round tender process.
  • The call center operation was overly fragmented- with five disparate teams, each operating in volatile demand markets, which exacerbated forecast variability. Pooling agent capacity could reduce demand variability significantly, allowing Icario to take utilization risk and obtain improved pricing. Pooling call volumes would require an investment in agent capability, however.

Example insight: By understanding the economic drivers of each key part of the business, Icario could measure appropriate KPI and manage outsourced providers effectively—avoiding a cost / quality tradeoff. Following a rigorous vendor evaluation and sourcing process, Icario invested in a highly capable call center partner, capable of cross-training agents and pooling call volumes while improving agents’ performance and the logic underlying member call timing and sequencing.

Impact:

  • Icario realized $2.7M of annual engagement cost reduction
    • $1.9M in call center costs (25% reduction)
    • $0.8M in print costs (36% reduction)
  • For call centers, both cost efficiency effectiveness improved, effectively reducing the cost per completed Health Risk Assessment by 50%

Overall, Icario’s call center unit costs decreased by ~25%.