Optimizing the Policyholder Journey
in Health Care.
Managing one’s health insurance is no mean feat. It’s easy to get lost in a sea of offers, figuring out what services are covered or subject to conditions.
Based on this observation, a leader in health insurance took on the task of transforming the customer experience, and asked for our support in this venture.
The following challenges were set out:
– Modeling and understanding the customer experience and the advisor experience
– Understanding the mechanisms and limitations of health insurance offers
– Envisioning a new customer experience and new advisor experience
– Developing an action plan to implement this new experience
Fully understanding the customer experience
in order to optimize it.
To be able to optimize the customer experience, you first need to understand it.
We therefore, as usual, began by conducting an analysis.
We headed into the field to meet users along with all stakeholders involved in the process.
Mirroring the customer and advisor experiences.
In order to highlight the moments and interactions to be enhanced, we modeled the user experience by mirroring it with the advisor experience.
This parallel revealed the interactions between the customer and advisor journeys and allowed us to identify a number of areas that could be improved.
With the modeling complete, the advisor’s pivotal role and importance became apparent. They are the person who explains and guides a customer’s usage.
Yet this advisory work can be challenging, as the advisor must be able to juggle a large number of offers and policies with various levels of coverage, while still adopting different stances depending on the customer and the type of policy intended for them.
A transformational challenge for the company.
The advisor:
A key actor in the insurance customer experience.
To create a consistent experience, you must take into account all the stakeholders that interact with this offer, along with their needs and daily life.
As they will play a significant role in the end user’s experience, their own experience must be crafted and refined.
In the specific case of health insurance, the customer’s ability to listen is often limited due to the situations they are dealing with (hospitalization, pain, chronic illness, assisting a loved one in a difficult situation, etc.).
This means that the customer needs the advisor to take their time and carefully explain the ins and outs of individual policies.
We noticed that policyholders were seldom aware of all the services they were entitled to. For their part, advisors didn’t always have time to explain policy details in a precise and tailored way, as the need for cost effectiveness led them to favor shorter phone calls.
It is crucial for advisors to have the technical tools and expertise required to offer the best services available to policyholders. They must also be able to provide guidance on the use of coverage and make sure customers are aware of all the services at their disposal.
This was one of many insights that emerged from our research and inspired promising areas of transformation to improve the overall experience.
It is important to develop and design the advisor and customer experiences so that they are fully compatible and all their interactions are seamless.
Working together, creating internal connections, and learning from one another.
Reevaluate he adviser's role...
Again with the goal of helping advisors perform their role in the best possible conditions, we identified three major areas of transformation:
– tweaking the service offering
– rethinking the advisor’s job
– rethinking the advisor’s approach to different offers
To identify and activate these opportunities for improvement, we needed to gain a clear view of each link in the chain, along with specific knowledge of each job.
To do so, we conducted a collaborative project with all divisions.
We encouraged each division to engage with the project, and to work with the other divisions during knowledge-building workshops to envision solutions for these challenges and deploy them throughout the company.
This made it possible to organize a comprehensive transformation plan carried out by the company’s divisions.
