A US health benefits provider: Cisco on premises to Genesys Cloud CX, with self-service

The provider's customer service team answers providers and members about eligibility, benefits and claims. Its contact centre ran on Cisco on premises, with Cisco Unified Contact Centre Express and Finesse for agents and Cisco Unified Communications Manager for telephony, Calabrio for workforce and quality management, and Nuance for speech recognition in the IVR. Each was a separate system to run, license and keep in step.

The provider wanted one cloud platform for voice, self-service, recording, workforce management and quality, with an IVR able to answer common provider questions from its own data instead of passing every call to an agent. It bought Genesys Cloud CX 2 from a global systems integrator, whose managed service now provides business-as-usual support, and the integrator brought in QVCCS to design and deliver it.

Technical and business discovery began in July 2025. The IVR design went through 18 versions with the provider's team, the first reviewed in August and signed off with the configuration checklist on 22 August. The organisation was activated in September, the carrier trunks configured, and the build tested in a separate UAT organisation before being cloned to production and validated again.

1. Technical and business discovery, and a demonstration session
2. IVR design, functional requirements and configuration checklist sign-off
3. Firewall, network and virtual desktop readiness, with network assessments from each way agents work
4. Build: call flows, data actions, queues, scripts, recording, workforce and quality management
5. System integration testing, then user acceptance testing with the provider's own team
6. Training for supervisors, administrators and agents
7. Production clone, revalidation, go-live and warranty support

The main benefits line opens with a choice for providers, members, language assistance and other enquiries. Providers pass a provider identity check before reaching their menu, so the IVR knows which practice is calling. From there they can hear typical benefits for a member, check a claim, look up coverage for a procedure by its code, change to another member without starting again, have a benefits summary sent by fax, or reach an agent.

Members have their own menu, and a large public-sector employer group has a dedicated line and queue, with its own in-queue treatment. Every in-queue flow plays messages held in data tables, so the team can change what callers hear, or switch a message on or off, without a change to the flows. An emergency table does the same for unplanned closures, and callers can choose a callback rather than holding.

Agents receive each call with what the IVR has already learned shown in an inbound script: who the caller is, which member, and what they asked for. Scripts also cover manual outbound calls, callbacks and voicemail, so the agent starts every interaction with the same view.

The IVR's answers come from the provider's own data warehouse, through APIs its developers built for Genesys Cloud. QVCCS defined what each call path needed, wrote the API expectations with the provider's team, and built the Genesys Cloud data actions that call them during the call.

Five services sit behind the self-service: enrolment search, to find the member and their plan; claims search; a benefits summary by coverage level; maximums and deductibles; and the set of benefit codes used for procedure lookups. Test data agreed with the provider was used to exercise every response the IVR has to speak, including members with several coverage spans and procedures with several codes, before a single real call was taken.

• Enrolment search, to identify the member and plan
• Claims search
• Benefits summary by coverage level
• Maximums and deductibles
• Benefit code sets for procedure lookups
• Fax requests for benefits summaries

Many agents work on Azure Virtual Desktop. Running a WebRTC phone inside a virtual desktop puts voice through the remote session, so the design uses Genesys Cloud's WebRTC Media Helper, which keeps the Genesys Cloud interface in the virtual desktop while the voice runs directly on the agent's own machine. Network assessments were run from an office laptop, a remote laptop on VPN and the virtual desktop estate before build.

Agents sign in with Microsoft Entra ID single sign-on, with the provider's existing multi-factor authentication, and SCIM creates and updates their Genesys Cloud accounts from Entra ID groups. Call recordings are exported to the provider's own AWS S3 storage in the US East region for long-term retention.

The provider now runs one Genesys Cloud CX organisation in US East (N. Virginia), with BYOC Cloud trunks from the integrator's carrier, member, provider and employer-group queues, and outbound calling on behalf of a manual outbound queue so every call shows the right caller ID. Genesys Cloud workforce management replaced Calabrio, with a management unit, service goals, planning groups, three shift work plans and rotations; Genesys Cloud quality management replaced it for evaluations, using a scorecard built from the provider's own customer service standards.

Nuance's role in the IVR is now played by Genesys Cloud's own speech and DTMF handling in Architect, and Finesse has given way to the Genesys Cloud agent workspace. Supervisors and agents have dashboards, and agents can see dashboards made for them personally.

• Genesys Cloud CX 2 for about 80 users at launch
• Provider and member self-service from the provider's own data
• Workforce and quality management replacing Calabrio
• Azure Virtual Desktop with the WebRTC Media Helper
• Entra ID single sign-on and SCIM
• Recordings exported to the provider's AWS S3 storage

System integration testing finished at the end of October and user acceptance testing in mid-November, with each defect logged and tracked in a shared tracker. Supervisors and administrators were trained first, then agents. Before cutover, a live simulation with a reference group of agents walked every expected caller journey.

The cutover window opened on the evening of 3 December 2025 and the contact centre went live on 4 December. Live numbers were redirected to the integrator's carrier numbers in Genesys Cloud, so the go-live did not wait for porting; toll-free numbers were then ported once the authorisation was signed. A go-live support bridge ran through the first days, followed by warranty support into January 2026.

Early issues were few and practical. WebRTC connection errors on some agent machines were resolved when the provider's IT team allowed the Genesys Cloud desktop app through its endpoint security software, and some wireless headsets needed new firmware. A report of missing callback recordings turned out to be a training point, closed with a job aid on handling callbacks.

With customer service live, three more teams moved to Genesys Cloud CX in March 2026: the provider network team, provider network support and employer services. Each followed the same method at a smaller scale: its own call flow design, configuration checklist, Entra ID groups through SCIM, user acceptance test scripts and go-live method statement.

The provider network team went live on 12 March 2026. Its flow added a direct route from the provider option on the main benefits line, so a provider who needs the network team reaches it without passing through customer service. Employer services went live on 19 March 2026 with its own main and agent numbers and queues, and provider network support also went live in March, taking the organisation to about 150 users.

Two change requests followed go-live, and both are live. The first added 23 flow outcomes across the main benefits line and the employer-group line, recording which path each caller took: provider or member, whether the provider identity check was captured and verified, and which self-service option they used. That lets the provider see where callers go in the IVR and which paths end with an agent, without exporting data or building custom reports.

The second enabled speech and text analytics for the customer service queues, so conversations are transcribed and can be searched and mined for topics. Together they give the provider the evidence for the next round of self-service, which Phase 2 is now being planned around.

The provider has retired its Cisco contact centre, Calabrio and Nuance in favour of one Genesys Cloud CX organisation. Providers and members can answer common questions from the provider's own data without waiting for an agent, agents start every call knowing who is calling and why, and workforce and quality management sit in the same platform as the calls.

Customer service went live on 4 December 2025 after a full live simulation, and three more teams followed in March 2026 using the same method at a smaller scale, flow outcomes and speech analytics are measuring the IVR, and Phase 2 is in planning, with business-as-usual support from the integrator's managed service.

• Cisco UCCX, Finesse and CUCM, Calabrio and Nuance replaced
• Live on 4 December 2025
• Three more teams live in March 2026, about 150 users
• 23 flow outcomes and speech and text analytics live
• Phase 2 in planning