UnitedHealthcare of the Carolinas is well on its way toward adding 573 employees this year in an expansion announced in February. But 85 of those new jobs will now be located in the Raleigh area instead of the Triad.
Corporate real estate officials with the Minnesota-based insurer say they were unable to find suitable space in the Triad to accommodate the expanded work force.
“We were out of space. The inn is full,” said David Pettitt, director of member services for UnitedHealthcare, talking about the company’s Greensboro headquarters. “The Raleigh location was the best choice.”
The expansion is being fueled by the insurance carrier’s continued growth nationwide and addition of new services. So far, UnitedHealthcare has added 267 new workers in Greensboro who are dedicated to customer service and to claims processing, with plans to add up to 90 more workers by the end of the year. In addition, about 85 workers will be hired by October to staff the Raleigh call center with customer service and claims processing representatives, with the expectation that the new location could accommodate up to 200 workers in the future.
Additionally, UnitedHealthcare is in the process of hiring 125 frontline clinical personnel, such as registered nurses and nurse practitioners, as part of its new HouseCalls program. Information about how many hires have been made toward that goal was not immediately available.
“To be honest with you, we’ll continue to grow,” Pettitt said. “UnitedHealthcare continues to forge ahead in our economy and continues working with health care reform pieces.”
Pettitt said the company has been fortunate to find a “wonderful” pool of applicants for the customer service and claims processing positions.
He said UnitedHealthcare routinely fielded about 1,500 applications and identify the best 15 to 20 new staff members.
The open positions have attracted applicants largely from within an hour of Greensboro, including the Martinsville, Va., area to the north, beyond Winston-Salem to the west and east of Burlington, Pettitt said.
With the additions, UnitedHealthcare employs about 700 customer service representatives tied to its Greensboro office, with about 30 to 35 percent of those staff telecommuting. That total includes the 194 customer service reps hired this year, Pettitt said.
Typically, a customer service or claims processing representative needs to spend at least a year in the office before being eligible to work off-site, Pettitt said. These new hires have been filling some of the chairs left empty by existing employees moving to telecommuting, he said.
When UnitedHealthcare announced its growth plans in February, UnitedHealthcare of the Carolinas CEO Garland Scott said then that they anticipated the company’s four-story, 170,000-square-foot headquarters on North Elm to absorb the growth through renovating existing space, changing shifts, extending hours and changing staffing coverage.
But the company has run out of room due to new staff additions. Pettitt said members of UnitedHealthcare’s corporate real estate team explored space in Charlotte and Burlington, and looked extensively in Greensboro before settling on the Raleigh location for a satellite office.
UnitedHealthcare didn’t pursue and wasn’t offered incentives for the staffing growth, so the company doesn’t miss out on direct financial incentives by sending a portion of these new jobs to a different market.
Rich Mossman, a senior vice president with real estate firm CBRE, said there are multiple factors that go into a real estate deal like UnitedHealthcare’s selection of Raleigh for the call center, beyond just the availability of building inventory. Call centers typically require large floor plates and ample parking, and the inventory of buildings with that is slightly lower, Mossman said.
“But with that being said and depending on the requirement, I know of multiple buildings in the Triad that could make sense for a call center user like them,” Mossman said.
The customer service and claims processing staff in Greensboro handle a national clientele, and Pettitt expects the demand for their services to continue to grow. One factor spurring that growth is that customer service representatives now handle calls regarding prescriptions, work that had been previously funneled to a specially trained customer service team.
With the growth in prescription services handled by UnitedHealthcare, that frontline staff now has the ability to field those calls themselves, Pettitt said.
Date: Jul 3, 2013