Relieving customer pain: How IWP revamped hiring and bettered its business

Background

Injured Workers Pharmacy (IWP) is a national pharmacy service that acts as an advocate for injured individuals by removing the financial burden from the prescription process. IWP ships medications directly to patients nationwide and collects payment from insurance companies—resulting in minimal out-of-pocket expenses for the patient, physician, or attorney on approved claims. This reduces the time and energy spent on prescriptions and paperwork while ensuring injured individuals get the continuous quality care they deserve. Unlike traditional mail-order pharmacies that offer a 7-14 day turnaround, IWP’s 240 employees ensure that prescriptions can be delivered the next day. 

The Opportunity

To meet increased demand and competition in the prescription delivery space, IWP needed to hire high performers to grow its Inside Sales Department. Tasked with making outbound calls to injured individuals, these candidates needed to strike a delicate balance between being empathetic but persuasive.

“These sales representatives need to be friendly, outgoing, compassionate, understanding, and sympathetic while also being diligent, organized, thorough, and precise,” said Julie Walsh, IWP’s Inside Sales Manager. “We need a nice blend between customer service skills and sales skills. It’s very challenging to find people with the right balance of all these traits, which are necessary to be successful in our inside sales department.” 

The Solution

Faced with pressure to hire talent with the right skills and temperament, Walsh turned to PI Certified Partner Laura Caton of The Cornerstone Group. For more than 20 years, The Cornerstone Group has used talent optimization to help thousands of leaders effectively acquire, manage, develop, and utilize talent to drive performance. 

To help IWP hire the right people, Caton recommended The Predictive Index Behavioral Assessment™.  By classifying workplace behaviors, the behavioral assessment empowers organizations to measure what drives and motivates job candidates and current employees.

“The Cornerstone Group and Laura have been wonderful to work with,” said IWP Director of Human Resources Robin Lucier. “Laura is so accessible, enthusiastic, and goes above and beyond for us.”

With this strong partnership in place, Walsh and Lucier were able to implement and champion PI within the organization. Caton’s expertise helped make employees’ and candidates’ behavioral profiles easy to understand, giving them insight into how different people preferred to communicate and what types of drives were associated with high performers. This took the guesswork out of what to look for in hiring successful candidates to fill their inside sales roles.

The Results

After incorporating the PI Behavioral Assessment, IWP achieved a more streamlined and effective hiring process. No longer did they need to guess at what how to pinpoint the intersection of empathy and persuasion—the behavioral assessment unveiled motivators and behaviors while simultaneously improving communication.

“The PI Behavioral Assessment has been a great tool that’s helped us with hiring,” said Walsh. “The insight it gives me into a job candidate’s personality, motivators, behaviors, and drives is invaluable.”

The inside sales department—one of the key teams that needed improvement—achieved a drastic increase in retention, with the department contributing to a mere 5% of the company’s total turnover. Lucier attributes this to internal employee promotions, which were a result of using the PI Behavioral Assessment to gain insight into how to develop top performers.

“The PI Behavioral Assessment has been such an important tool for us and plays a huge role in our recruiting, hiring, and coaching efforts,” shared Lucier. “The inside sales department, which uses the PI Behavioral Assessment more than any other department, has significantly less turnover than other departments—and I credit much of this to the department’s use of the behavioral assessment.”

And it’s not just IWP’s employees that benefit—optimizing their talent strategy has improved communication and enhanced the customer experience, giving IWP an edge over competitors.

“We’re making much better hiring decisions, greatly reducing turnover, and giving our customers a better experience,” said Walsh. “Customer satisfaction has increased because of our sales representatives who truly care about the people they’re talking with.”