Delta Dental of Tennessee has been growing at a double-digit rate for more than five years, and it’s finding that the bigger its numbers get, the harder it’s going to be to maintain the same growth.

“We have a single product line—dental insurance,” said Dr. Philip Wenk, president and CEO of the Nashville-based organization. “We have to continue to look for ways to be more innovative and consumer-oriented, because we’re selling something that is less than an attraction and more a necessity.”

Voluntary programs
Wenk said there are several factors driving the growth of Delta Dental of Tennessee. The south, Tennessee in particular, has shown growth in employment, and in that process, there has been a demand for more services such as dental insurance. “Historically, Tennessee has been not only a right-to-work state but a state where people haven’t seen a lot of industry headquarters,” Wenk explained.

“We’re seeing a lot of companies establishing themselves here, and they want to add our products to their array of recruitment strategies.”

In the northern states, the majority of companies pay a significant amount, if not all, of the medical and dental benefits. In Tennessee, Wenk said Delta would not be competitive if it only bid on a situation where the group or employer paid. “We also offer a voluntary program, which is about 65% of our total business. That allows employers to provide the benefit and not pay a penny,” he said.

At the end of 1999, Delta Dental of Tennessee’s (DDTN) revenues were at $59 million, and at the end of last year, it brought in about $162 million. “That’s the kind of growth we’ve been seeing these last seven years,” Wenk said. “And no organization can pull those numbers off without great people.”

More work, less people
In 2000, DDTN had approximately 80 employees processing about 550,000 claims per year; today, 60 people process more than 1 million claims annually. DDTN has a processing accuracy rate of 99.93%, and 95% of all customer service calls are handled within two minutes.

Delta’s only area of employee growth has been in customer service, and the company provides extensive training to those employees. After an employee gets hired, he/she gets 60 days of training before they handle any phone calls.

“We have separate training for new customer service employees using staged calls. They have a supervisor go over everything with them, from how they should answer the customer to how they can get information to the customer more quickly.”

After the 60 days, employees are put in the call center, and they always work with a supervisor present. If they hit a snag, the supervisor is able to respond to them immediately. All calls are recorded for two reasons: to make sure the employee is properly responding to the customer, and for security purposes if any questions were to arise regarding a call.

Employees go through varied training on an annual basis. “We have a continuous process improvement program, which is run by the officers and managers of the company,” said Wenk. “They review the desktop manuals and sit with the employees to watch them perform their jobs. After that, they have a positive critique session. One officer from each department critiques his or her team, person by person.

DDTN partners with a other Delta Dentals to save costs. It turned to Delta Dental of Arkansas for its optical care recognition program. “We scan all of our claims here, and we determined it was not economically feasible for us to buy an optical care recognition program by ourselves,” said Wenk.

“We help cover their costs because we have about as many claims per year as they do. This speeds up our work. We used to have 10 people doing the data entry for this, and now we’re down to one part- time person. This has been a significant savings.”

And DDTN has purchased processing services from Delta Dental of Michigan (DDMI). “We found that by using their state-of-the-art claims processing system, the cost was less than maintaining our own system,” Wenk said.

“The other thing we have done with Michigan is purchase a third-party administrator to create a second line of dental and insurance products,” said Wenk. These products will be sold through a company that DDTN and DDMI will share under a profit entity called Renaissance.

“I don’t foresee us continuing to have double-digit growth in the future; the population of Tennessee won’t support that. But I feel like we have positioned ourselves with this for-profit venture to be profitable outside of Delta Dental,” said Wenk.