Zinnia Health is a leading mental health and substance disorder treatment center that provides inpatient and outpatient care across five states. Boasting an 87% completion rate for its substance disorder program (35% higher than the national average), Zinnia has proven itself a leader in the field and an invaluable resource for at-risk patients.
Zinnia’s success is powered by its 24/7 admissions hotline, which allows agents to connect with prospective patients and screen them for program fit and eligibility.
However, patients with mental health issues and substance disorders face significant barriers to treatment. Failure to effectively engage with and ultimately enroll these patients can not only cost a business like Zinnia revenue, but also put lives in danger.
Zinnia’s managers have historically had limited insight into hotline call quality and efficiency, so its substance disorder admissions team turned to Verbal’s virtual care AI to transform their contact center with live conversation intelligence.
This collaboration has created a more effective quality assurance program, improved downline agent performance metrics and fueled an estimated $1.1 million in additional monthly revenue.
How Verbal empowers the Zinnia team
To optimize Zinnia’s admissions process and ensure calls met the organization’s quality and compliance standards, Verbal built a real-time call quality checklist and quality assurance (QA) scoring model.
Powered by AI and tailored to Zinnia’s best practices, the Verbal checklist offers agents a responsive, step-by-step guide to successful screening. Verbal analyzes 100% of calls in real time and gives agents feedback on next steps while highlighting protocols they may have missed. This ensures compliance and helps agents effectively collect information needed for admission.
Verbal also generates a 0-100 QA score after each call based on how closely it followed Zinnia’s best practices, offering agents a clear performance target while reinforcing training.
“It helped me get better at what I was doing,” says Kathy Ivins, a Zinnia contact center agent. “It was exciting to look at your score and then go back and figure out what you did wrong so you get it right for the next call.”
Automated QA scoring also boosts the efficiency of Zinnia’s in-house QA team and allows managers to assess team performance and call quality at scale.
Before Verbal, Zinnia’s managers had little visibility into agent performance and could only conduct QA on a small sample of calls. Now, managers can track compliance and call quality across 100% of interactions and get the insight they need to deliver feedback that makes a difference.
“We wanted to see how agents were doing on a level we could not yet quantify,” says Will Sams, a Zinnia Admissions Manager. “There’s no more guessing or assuming. We have it at our fingertips what someone is struggling with in Verbal.”
Improved agent performance metrics
Central to Zinnia’s intake process is verifying a patient’s insurance coverage or other eligible benefits to ensure they’re a fit for the program. As such, Zinnia’s key metric for measuring agent performance is the successful verification of benefits (VoB).
During Verbal’s five-month pilot with Zinnia, agents who increased their Verbal QA score by 20 points also increased their percentage of successful VoB by 25%. This means that as an agent’s Verbal QA score increased, they were more likely to successfully verify a patient’s program eligibility, leading to more admissions and increased revenue.
Before Verbal, Zinnia’s agents met their successful VoB target (a monthly VoB score of 12 or more) 11% of the time. This jumped to 67% after Verbal.
| 11%
agents meeting VoB target |
67% agents meeting VoB target |
Percent of agents with monthly VoB of 12 or more; based on ratio of successful VoB to first-time calls
Millions in additional revenue
An increase in successful VoB directly impacts Zinnia’s revenue, as this allows more eligible patients to be admitted for treatment.
With Verbal, Zinnia boosted its overall rate of successful VoB from 9% to 11.25%. Given approximately 8,000 calls per month and a 20% conversion rate from successful VoB to admission, this has resulted in an average of 66 additional admissions per month (180 admits on per month, up from 114 before Verbal).
Zinnia’s average contract value is $30,000, so this increase in admits has led to approximately $1.1 million in additional monthly revenue — from $4.3 million per month to $5.4 million per month.
What’s next?
Thanks to Verbal’s auto-QA and real-time feedback, Zinnia has already seen huge wins across its business KPIs, from patient admissions to revenue. Most important, more at-risk patients are getting the care they need.
Now, Zinnia is deploying Verbal to automate and optimize other areas of its contact center operations.
“With Verbal,” says Sams, “we’re going to be able to surpass our own limits.”
