Case Study: CIGNA Healthcare achieves 85% forecast accuracy and nearly $50K annual ROI with NICE Systems (IEX Workforce Management & SmartSync)

Boosted forecast accuracy from 50 to 85 percent with NICE IEX Workforce Management solution

CIGNA Healthcare, a managed medical, pharmacy and dental benefits provider with about 3,400 contact center agents, faced inefficiencies from manual workforce processes and complex routing. Annual agent vacation data was loaded by spreadsheet—taking nearly two man‑months and requiring manual corrections on ~2% of entries—and forecasting was meeting goals only half the time, with weekly refinements consuming eight hours due to an excessive number of contact types and skills.

Working with NICE Professional Services, CIGNA implemented a SmartSync integration to auto‑update vacation data nightly from payroll and consolidated contact types (cutting CTs by more than 50% and mapping multiple queues per CT). The changes boosted forecast accuracy from 50% to 85%, made forecast adjustments 75% faster (saving about $8,000/year), and produced a $41,000 first‑year ROI from automated vacation processing—roughly $49,000 in annual savings overall.

Cigna

Lillian Hill

Resource Planning Senior Associate, CIGNA Healthcare