2018 is likely to be a year of uncertainty and change for health insurance markets. However, one thing that remains unchanged is your member’s desire for a better customer experience. To help you plan your customer experience strategy for 2018 and beyond, Newgen recently hosted a webinar featuring Kate McCarthy, Senior Forrester Analyst for Healthcare.
Kate shared six key insights to help healthcare payers earn member loyalty. This week I am sharing a brief summary of the first three insights shared by Kate and the remaining 3 in the coming week. Please share your thoughts and comments on these below.
Insight 1. The need for Healthcare Payers to become Customer Obsessed
Healthcare as a whole is adopting a B2C (business to consumer) model. Forrester sees the healthcare customer journey evolving and encourages healthcare payers to become customer obsessed.
The reimbursement model is changing. With value-based care and wellness coming to play, the industry is moving away from siloed experiences. Organizations are innovating and engaging with mobile and consumer devices, trying to drive care to patient’s doorsteps.
All of this suggests healthplans to learn how to treat members as customers and become truly obsessed with their experience. This requires you to gain a 360-degree view of your customers’ information and create the right engagement moments in their context.
Insight 2. The 3 key areas driving Customer Experience Quality
Forrester talks about customer experience basis 3 core areas, which are:
- Effectiveness– To deliver an effective experience, you need to sell a product that your customers understand.
- Ease– The products should be easy to use. After a customer purchases a product, he/she should be able to easily use it and get value out of it.
- Emotion– In healthcare, this is largely about trust. You have to build that much-needed trust with your customers so that they invest with you.
At Newgen, we believe that mobility can enable all three of these requirements. For example, a Mobile Medicare enrollment solution can allow consumers to easily understand your health plan offerings, seamlessly submit their information and build trust by creating transparency and reducing wait times.
Insight 3. The existing system of records cannot suffice in the Age of the Customer
The lack of interoperability across systems has resulted in siloed experiences. Kate highlights that to build better experiences, there is a need to connect the entire healthcare ecosystem, which includes claims from payers, pharmaceutical companies data and providers’ data. Further, connecting all of this with IoT, social, environmental and location data.
Making a shift into the Age of the Customer entails health plans to build customer loyalty models. Below are 6 priorities as per Forrester that can help close gaps in customer engagement:
- Map your journey to your patient, provider, and employee journey. Make your website accessible and easy to understand.
- Mobile is the primary way of engaging today. Build mobile-first digital tools.
- Prioritize features that your customers want.
- Simplify language and instructions. Avoid acronyms, complicated language and use visual tools.
- Use patient location data to identify where your customer is and deliver the right experience at the right moment.
- Build a connected digital ecosystem to deliver an omnichannel experience.
