3 Ways Health Insurers Can Prioritize Member Experience in 2021

An industry-wide shift toward consumerism and value-based care reflects modern consumers’ desire for transparency around their healthcare coverage. In order to meet these heightened expectations, insurers must adapt and identify new ways to educate, engage and support members who are taking ownership of their options.

Every member interaction presents an opportunity for insurers to create a frictionless experience and demonstrate competence, knowledge, professionalism and other qualities that drive satisfaction and foster loyalty. From member insights to agent training, there are a number of elements insurers should optimize in order to provide the best experience possible.

Whether revamping an existing member experience program or starting one from scratch, insurers should focus on identifying drivers of member satisfaction, fully leveraging contact center insights and flagging pain points across the member journey.

Pinpoint Drivers of Member Satisfaction

Insurers can jumpstart their member experience programs by first implementing an analytics solution that can analyze and integrate data from member calls, provider calls, emails, chat, complaints, surveys, digital forums, social media, blogs, ratings and reviews and more. An analytics solution that can capture insights from both structured and unstructured data provides insurers with a 360-degree view of the member experience, allowing them to make decisions based on insights rather than old data or gut instinct.

Once a compelling analytics solution is in place, insurers should examine insights for clues to understand why members are having a positive or negative experience. Enriching the data and considering measures such as sentiment, effort, emotion and intent allows these organizations to pinpoint the characteristics that cultivate positive member experiences and strive to recreate those elements across all interactions. Insurers can also use an understanding of which attributes members value most to inform marketing messages for both current and prospective members.

Fully Leverage Contact Center Insights

When it comes to capturing comprehensive insights about the member experience, it can be easy to overlook the wealth of data that exists in the contact center. Insurers should analyze conversations from calls, emails and chats to identify primary contact drivers and top inquiry topics. This information can be used to prepare representatives to confidently answer frequently asked questions and continuously inform coaches and supervisors as new types of questions appear.

Oftentimes, the contact center will be one of the first places someone goes with a question that cannot be easily answered elsewhere. As a result, the conversations that take place hold a tremendous amount of information that might not appear on other channels. Identifying areas of confusion can help insurers create more effective educational materials, improve self-service features and optimize the digital experience to deflect contact volume altogether. Furthermore, contact center data may contain information that is relevant to a different part of the organization. By identifying those details and sharing insights across departments, contact center data can drive member experience improvements across touch points.

Proactively Identify Pain Points

In order to reduce the chances that existing members will churn, health insurers must work to reduce or eliminate pain points across the member journey. With an effective analytics solution in place, these companies can quickly identify drivers of dissatisfaction and flag concerns as they arise.

Feedback that an organization obtains from members, prospective members or even publicly available data sources that focus on the broader market helps companies determine which features, policies or options are most attractive or unattractive to individuals across a consumer base. Setting up category models to filter feedback for competitor mentions can help insurers find out why members switch to different plans or are at risk of leaving altogether. This type of competitive intelligence can inform product development decisions and marketing messages while supporting savvy insurers’ ability to capitalize on market trends.

The Path to Success

By implementing an omni-channel analytics solution and using it to optimize and replicate a positive member experience, health insurers can succeed in creating a frictionless, end-to-end experience that increases member satisfaction, earns customer loyalty and mitigates the risk of churn. By strategically leveraging the data that is oftentimes already available and working to establish care as a competitive differentiator, insurers will continuously improve their program and prove to customers that they care.

Julie Miller is Vice President of Product Marketing at Clarabridge.