customer advocate

actuary

software engineer

business analyst

analyst

Health Care Service Corporation

HCSC has good benefits for its employees. Until about 6-7 years ago, health benefits were free. This stopped when HCSC decided to take bids on the cost to insure its workforce, and no other company would bid. Why? Because free benefits attracted the sick, obese, etc.

Because of this, people who get in at the company tend to stay for life. Having 10+ years on the job isn't unusual at all, and people only really get recognized at 30+. Due to this, advancement requires someone to retire. Think of it as dominoes, something like this: Pretend you, your brother, and your dad run a Jimmy John's. You sweep the floors, your brother makes the sandwiches, and your dad does the books. You are going to be sweeping the floor until your dad retires, because then your brother will do the books, you'll make the sandwiches, and you'll hire one of your friends (note: hirings are rarely based on merit) to sweep the floors. And then it repeats.

Management at the company is quite bad. This is because many of the directors, vps, and up have no other qualification besides being at the company 20+ years and a bachelors degree. The company is run like a privately family owned company; execs get moved up by picking the winning side in a dispute or by being the "whipping boy" for an executive - when things go bad you say "sorry, it was my fault, not his." Then someone says, you should fire her, and you say that she makes mistakes but she's been given many responsibilities and she is still developing. This exact situation would happen to me, for example, I'd complete my piece of work and send it to the director for approval 2 weeks before it was due. Then I would be assigned other work and do that. Then the director tells me that we missed the deadline and it's my fault, and I'm like Oh hell no. So I forward her the email from 2 weeks ago saying "the work is on your chair for signature, please sign and return at your earliest convenience." She told the vp it was my fault and then tells me she refuses to show him that email! So I go into his office and show him the email. He says that regardless of anything, it's my fault. Why did he say that? Because she was his "whipping boy," she'd jump on any grenades that he had to deal with, which keep him shiny and clean. It's counter-intuitive, but what I needed to do to move up at HCSC was to say Everyone, it's my fault, I didn't follow up enough and it's totally my fault. Take the bad review for the year, but show that I was happy to be a whipping boy. Merit is irrelevant at this company, what matters is if you are a "friend" and play the game.

The environment at the company is very unfriendly. I was lucky and happened to get some nice co-workers to go out to lunch with and we even made friends with some managers that were inside our division, but had different responsibilities (slightly different group). Their management told them to stop going to lunch with us, then our management moved us around so that we weren't near each other and then we were directly discouraged from socializing. This isn't the company where people say Hi to each other in the hall or even the office.

The hardest part of my job was working until midnight because my manager or director didn't do something that I had given them 2 weeks ago until the last minute. If you work at this company, make sure to do absolutely nothing more than your job description. If you need someone else's signature or approval on a piece of work, don't drop it off with them and expect them to sign it and send it back. Many times they will simply do nothing with it, then the deadline passes, and they will blame it on you. This is actually intentional! They are protecting their own job by making sure that no one below them looks good enough to do their job.

The most enjoyable part, besides the little group I had (because you can luck into a good group of co-workers at any job) was the ability to focus on one company, unlike public accounting. The company's story is very interesting too, how it started, its history, etc. and when you get to talk to someone with 20+ years of experience and they tell you the ups and downs, bad times and good times, it's like watching a really interesting documentary on TV.

To start with pros, BCBS or HCSC has really good benefits and pay. I felt as a customer advocate - especially near the end of my time there - that I was paid fairly for my work. This was mostly due to attrition but either way it was really nice. During the pandemic and even after, they would give us bonuses numerous amounts of times. When gas prices were up for a time, they gave us an extra couple hundred bucks each paycheck for these expenses - super generous! As for the working environment, coworkers, managerial approach, and metrics/goals, they were not so generous (at least for me personally.) Once the pandemic hit most everyone was WFH and I was one of the few that had to go back to the office full-time because my Internet was not stable where I lived then. As a result, I was 99% of the time at the office alone and did not talk to anyone except over chat. It got quite depressing after a while. Coworkers were fine, but it was just hard to communicate only over chat and not be able to see anyone. Miscommunication and moods were definitely downfalls. I preferred some people over others. The managerial approach depended on the manager you have. Some of them micromanaged more than others, which to me was annoying. The metrics/goals were not too bad to meet, but the company was quite strict on you about meeting them. Aftercall time was monitored by one of our departments who would message you if you were over 1 1/2-2 minutes after a call. This can be quite incessant, but it is their job after all. Overall, they could micromanage you quite a bit and were pretty strict about meeting metrics. As a company, I could understand it but it can be quite stressful on the individual. As a result of this, I felt just like a cog in the machine and was rarely, if ever, felt appreciated for my work - even when I went out of my way. PTO is fine, but it is a different system. Bottom line is if you know what days you want out of the year, take them NOW - otherwise, you may not be able to. Last minute important events/appointments you should be able to work around with your manager directly. As for last minute vacations - good luck with that. It was hard for me to request time off that I wanted a lot of the time because their PTO system takes into account your whole team's requested PTO. This means if one or two of your colleagues are out, then that means you cannot request that day off or leave early if need be - unless for emergencies. Even then they may not let you take paid time off and instead it would be unpaid. When you take unpaid time off, it comes out of your PTO balance too. It was not a perfect system. It was made so they could make sure they had enough people there and I understood that, but it definitely inhibited a bit of my work/life balance. It was ironic, as they always encouraged us to take PTO when we needed to. You did have plenty of PTO days to take though, as well as sick and holiday. I could go on and on but this is the gist. I never really felt appreciated there for my work and not individually recognized. The environment was depressing, work was unmotivating and simple, yet highly monitored, and socially was deserted. 

This is a high turnover, high pressure, stressful, and extremely solitary job.
There's a lot of OT available. You are "required" to work every other Saturday for 5 hours, but it's not "mandatory." Meaning, they can't write you up and is not put on your schedule, BUT, is weighed and considered in your performance and evaluations.
There are goals that you're actually rated on as well which includes workplace interaction and community interaction/company representation. However, rules prevent you from speaking with your co-workers, and community involvement takes away from your personal/family life. You basically have no life outside of BCBS/HCSC. The life you have within is comparable to solitary confinement.
You are graded on "idle time" (they monitor your mouse movement) but then you have meetings, training, refreshers, and "huddles" you are required to attend but your idle time during those events are still counted. If your computer or any of the DOZENS of programs you NEED to use simultaneously, have issues, which happens almost daily, that is also counted on your idle time.  You're also still expected to reach your daily production goals regardless of meetings and computer issues.
Every program you touch and access is also monitored. So if a program crashes and you can't work, you have to take computer class (no getting on fb or surfing the internet during downtime). You must ALWAYS, regardless of computer program crashes, be doing company work. Which is understandable, but just know they monitor EVERYTHING like you're about to commit a bank robbery and you've walked in with a hoodie on and sun glasses.
This is a multi-BILLION dollar company and the max "bonus" you can get works out to be around 1/1000% and they expect you to cry and be thankful for it (which you are, but it's laughable in comparison). 
Oh, and your bonus is based on your rating which, again, is based on the impossible-to-achieve goals they place on you. Impossible because of the restrictions they also place on you.
"Benefits" are ok. Call me old fashioned, but a benefit is something given to you. So health, vision, and dental (when working for THIS insurance co that has a multi BILLION $ profit from selling it) that costs your family roughly $250-300/paycheck is NO benefit. It's an offering and lip service.
Soo...if you NEED the money and can handle solitary confinement 7.5 hours a day minimum, high pressure, unrealistic expectations, no work life balance, daily program failures, and a company with a fake face put on for the public and rotten heart for it's employees, by all means, come join the madness.
Me? I'm constantly looking for outside opportunities, but I need the money. With OT, the pay is hard to beat in my area.

Typically I review employee reports to determine employee performance, produce and examine reports to show training areas individually, payroll, scheduling of time off.  I also work with my peers to help identify training needs and learning opportunities within their own units so that my team may be able to assist in helping with additional training for any low performers.

I have served on many Divisional committees in which I have shown leading results.

During times of hiring, I am in charge of all job postings (both internal and external), including all applicant screening, interviews and making offers of employment. 

I have great attention to detail and showed this capability both as an auditor and as the Quality Supervisor for both Claims and Inquiry Departments.

I can work both independently and on a team.  I am very analytical, including changing of workflows to meet business needs, job placement, and both hiring and terminating employees.  Our attrition level dropped significantly within our office once the hiring process was taken over by myself.

The biggest thing that I have learned is to identify and accommodate different learning styles and personality traits.  By doing so, I have become much better at coaching and communicating with my employees in a way that reaches them. This enables them to grow and succeed in their positions so that they are able to promote and make a career with our company and it does not become "just another job".  The return on that is the most favorite part of my job.

I would say that the most difficult part of my job, for me, is to say no.  I like to learn as much as I can and be part of change and implementation.  Sometimes this can cause me to have too much on my plate.  I do enjoy having a fast and busy work environment, however I have also learned that having too much on my plate can cause me  to work more hours in the day to ensure all tasks are completed timely and accurately.

I am looking for a professional position that allows me to use the knowledge base that I have acquired over the past several years. I am a loyal employee as you can see from my job history. I would like a career with longevity and room for growth.

Thank you for your time.

Stephanie Owen

When I first started at BCBS it was a great experience with amazing hours 8:30-5 M-F is the pretense I was hired on.  Although I love change the changes of the shifts really put a hindrance on working parents that pay daycare.  The schedules shifted from being a uniform time to anytime between 8-6 your schedule could be and it could vary every 2-3 months.  It was based on your performance and seniority and since blue cross is a company that gave you stability it was hard as a new hire only 4 years under my belt to get the early shifts.  If you weren't here for 7-8 years you had a better chance.  With 250+ reps that were all striving for the same shifts it was not the most logical way to introduce these shift changes when you were hired under the pretense of another shift!  I loved the job and my coworkers but it was also hard to get management to do what needed to be done.  They would always put it off on the customer advocates and when discipline was enforced, one manager was different from another manager in how they handled a similar situation, but all were suppose to follow the same protocol and not allow favoritism to come into play.  The workday was always busy and rigorous because we worked in a call center and would process claims and benefits information for our customers on a day to day basis. In this type of environment multitasking and being able to handle multiple phone lines as well as phone calls was a must!  The hardest part of the job was the inconsistency of the management and giving us last minute process changes and receiving  audits on the information when you weren't properly trained on it.  Audits generate poor performance reviews which generates less money on your gainsharing.  The most enjoyable part of the job is the customers and helping them when they have bills that they don't know how they were going to get resolved or how to go about getting a procedure approved and being able to go above and beyond by calling their dr office and the approval department to make sure that when they walked into the office for whatever procedure or specialist they needed to see everything was already in place and it was smooth sailing for them from there!

In a normal Work day come into work early always never late.  I at the moment take phone calls for providers. In which these may be benefit or claims call's.  I help provider customer services to assist in informing a provider of a patient benefit's.  In which the patient will know how much is owed to the provider.  Informs provider of special information that is specific to diagnosis codes and procedure codes.  Trained on idc-9 codes and not the new 1cd-10 codes as well.  With these codes I can advise in which what is excluded from a patient's policy there fore the provider can know of this before the patient is seen.  Also with procedure I will advise if any codes need to meet medical necessity.  Also, when taking claim calls I am able to adjust claims and review medical records.  I personally will also assist of any clarification on a denial a provider may have received.  I learned very much of the medical terminology and laws of health care.  I am very passionate of the health care field and I am currently in pursuing a degree in health care admin.  In which health care is my passion.  I am always wanting to learn more and always do my best in my work performance.  My coworkers are my team and I will strive my best to help them in anyway.  In which I have trained new ca's on claims and benefits in my current job.  The hardest part of my job currently is that I am unable to correct all system issue's that may arise on the back end of claims processing.  This is hard I say because when this is happens unfortunately this delays and is time taken from in which my providers need their claims processed, and paid.  This is me personally but I wish that when a provider call's I can be the first contact and only contact for all their needs.  This would be ideal to have one call to be able to address all of a provider's questions.  Although this happens though, I always strive to make sure my provider is satisfied at the end of the phone call.  This will make for a better experience for the provider even though their is a problem at hand.  I personally enjoy love working in the health care field.  I am passionate about working with providers for the member.

My department was full of managers that were bullies, it was filled with favoritism and nepotism, unrealistic workload expectations due to very high turnover, management had no experience but they were hired and promoted by their friends, stressful work environment, nurses were miserable, defeated by management and upper management walked around with blinders, making sure they were always politically correct and in my 20+ years I've never experienced such discrimination and lack of professionalism displayed by management and upper management. If you speak out they will target you in retaliation and push you out without ever addressing any real issues. Despite a mass exodus of excellent nursing staff, rather than making some real changes to improve, they just hire more nurses and the chaos and mistreatment cycle continues. Management was more concerned with personal agendas instead of what's in the best interest of the company. Integrity, fairness, respect and ethics was preached but never practiced by that particular department and regardless of your performance and work ethic, once anyone would voice a concern they were targeted and retaliated against by both management and upper management so that you eventually get pushed out or fired. Collectively, nurses in my department were treated like worthless workhorses that got targeted and bullied consistently if they spoke out. Since there is no change or resolution in process therefore no retention, they continue to hire nurses that quickly become dissatisfied with the position and that department has become a revolving door wasting company time and money! So, beware and choose your department wisely or choose to never have a voice or stand up for yourself and for what is ethically and morally right!

I worked as a Customer Advocate.

I like BCBS's general company culture. They're very health oriented, and they really tried to help their employees stay healthy. However, when the rubber actually hit the road, they played it safe. For example, I was working in a cubicle environment, sitting eight hours a day. Since we were timed on the phone, we didn't get much time away from our desks, and the job wasn't really set up where we could stand while we did it. I requested a fitness ball chair so I could practice better posture while sitting, and got shot down.

Typical day looked like this: Get to work, get settled, check e-mail, etc (all off the clock, because once you clocked in, you had to go available for phone calls within 3-5 minutes). Go available on phones. Answer phone calls for two hours. Take a fifteen minute break. Answer phone calls for two hours. Take a 30 minute lunch, off the clock. Come back, answer phone calls for two hours. Take a fifteen minute break. Answer phone calls for two hours. Every day. Day in, day out.

The hardest part of my job was the high standards for accuracy. Every single piece of information I gave out on the phone had to be accurate (one reason why BCBS is a good company), which made the job REALLY stressful.

Management was okay, I guess. Mostly you got the feeling that they felt for all us paeons on the floor, but were really looking at us like we were ants in a giant ant farm, interested in us just staying busy all the time.

I was twice as educated as most of my coworkers. The work there was difficult to learn in the beginning, but once you learned it, anyone could do it.

I took this job because I was a little desperate, and I figured if I busted my butt from the beginning, I'd get moved somewhere more useful pretty quickly. I wasn't necessarily wrong, but it would have taken way longer than I wanted.

I loved working here when I started because of the benefits, coworkers, and the building. 
But once it went downhill, there was NO stopping. 

I started in the benefits dept and had an awesome trainer. It was difficult at first but got easier as time went on. Then, I got transferred to the preauth department… I got put with a new team from Marion, with the weirdest weirdos. My trainer was absolutely HORRIBLE. She didn’t  even know how to do the job and would question what the information she gave us. If we had any questions or made a mistake, it was the end of the world. She would snicker and make a condescending remark. My new sup heard this same thing from multiple coworkers.

This dept had extreme micromanagement. If you didn’t have a 10 minute call and 10 second wrap up time, you were getting messaged. And if you didn’t say certain phrases at certain times of the call, you got a finding. I.e. not saying “Thanks for calling BCBS” at the end of a call even though you said it at the beginning.

On top of the micromanagement, we all were surprised by the fact we had to speak with members and received TWENTY MINUTES of member training. These calls were emotional as members were typically angry. My new supervisor didn’t allow me to take time after a call where someone’s cancer treatment was denied. These calls were mentally exhausting knowing I could do little to nothing to help them. They expect employees to be robots. 

All in all, I’m glad I found a way out. HCSC gives little care to its employees but the CEO can line his pockets with over $300,000.

There are many great people at HCSC. Unfortunately, there are also many leaders that lack the vision, the ability to execute, the management skills, and the interpersonal skills to be solid, effective leaders.  Many leaders would prefer to have their egos stroked by sub-par employees than have high performers making changes for the better of the company and its members.  Those leaders tend to rise through the ranks despite their inability to develop talent and evoke positive change that motivates others.  This is both an exciting and discouraging place to work.  Exciting because this is the place to be if you like working for a company that desperately needs process improvements and help becoming more efficient.  But it is discouraging because those improvements will die on the floor while leaders battle each other for credit, ownership, control, and power.  Those are the self-righteous leaders that feel their employees are their personal minions, there to execute but not be seen or heard, there to accomplish so that the leader can take credit and continue to rise, and the folks at the top either don't see this injustice or don't care. HCSC is praised for its diversity, however there is no diversity at the top of the organizational chart.  The company's diversity lies in its lowest ranking roles and grade levels, i.e. amongst its lowest paid employees.  There is so much change needed at HCSC, but I fear that those able to sign off on the change will not admit that the change is needed or allow such change to take place.

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