In the hyper-competitive landscape of health insurance, differentiation and success are now all about the member or customer experience. We’ve written extensively about the centrality of experience in consumer decisions around Medicare Advantage plans — and the same is largely true across the entire health insurance industry: Great experiences attract customers and drive long-term loyalty and “stickiness,” while poor experiences (or even small frustrations) can quickly drive people to switch health plans.
The biggest mistake health plans make around customer experience (CX) is making decisions on how to improve CX that aren’t aligned with what their customers actually care about most. That may mean deploying a fancy new technology that promises to improve your CX, or selecting one particular aspect of your CX that seems like an easy or high-value opportunity to boost CX.
Health plans’ CX initiatives need to start by understanding their members’ journeys: mapping out all of the touchpoints between your organization and your customers and analyzing to see where your customers have friction, pain points, difficulties or frustrations.
You might be surprised at what you find: You may uncover some quick-win ways to make small changes that drive big improvements in CX. In any case, starting with customer journey mapping will ensure your efforts and your investments to improve CX are aligned with what really matters most to your customers.
Key steps of member journey mapping for health plans
- Define your goals: It’s important to define specific goals or metrics that you are aiming to affect through your customer journey mapping initiative. For example, improving member retention or enhancing your customer satisfaction scores.
- Assemble your team: You’ll likely need a cross-functional team with representatives from marketing, sales, customer service, IT, and product development to provide broad perspectives on the end-to-end customer journey.
- Develop member personas: Create detailed personas—fictional representations of distinct groups of people—for specific market segments, such as Medicare Advantage enrollees, individual Exchange plan members, and employer group plan members. Each persona likely has a unique customer journey.
- Define the stages of the member journey: Identify the distinct stages or phases of the customer journey. These are generally organized around the specific need or intent that the customer has at a given point, such as enrollment, provider search, understanding coverage, getting care, improving health, managing healthcare finances, understanding claims, and renewal.
- Visualize all member touchpoints: Work with your cross-functional team to map out all the touchpoints and interactions that a customer might have with your health plan at each stage. Make sure to include digital touchpoints (web, mobile app, social media, text, email, chat or chatbot, etc.) as well as analog (call, direct mail, in-person visit, etc.).
- Collect insights: Gather both qualitative (interviews, focus groups, surveys) and quantitative (customer service records, complaint logs) data to help define and understand negative feedback and customer pain points.
- Map customer feedback to journey stages and touchpoints: Map your quantitative and qualitative customer feedback to the relevant journey stages or touchpoints. Identify emotions commonly felt by customers at each stage or touchpoint.
- Identify problem areas in the member journey: Analyze your fully mapped customer journeys to see where negative emotions and negative feedback are focused. On the flip side, identify the high points of your customer journey.
- Develop an improvement plan and monitor results: Create a specific action plan to address the pain points and problem areas in your customer journey. Evaluate the magnitude of the negative experience along with the feasibility and practicality of the solution in order to prioritize your action plans for both speed and effect.
- Monitor your results and repeat regularly: Continuously track relevant metrics (e.g., satisfaction scores, retention rates) and collect ongoing customer feedback to assess the effectiveness of your action plans and recognize the importance of making regular updates.
5 ways to use member journey mapping to improve health plan marketing
Member journey mapping is the critical starting point for improving your customer experience. But the exercise of journey mapping itself won’t automatically improve your CX. As outlined in the steps above, you need to define specific action plans to drive positive change.
Here are five ways to use the insights from your member journey mapping to improve your health plan marketing:
- Create targeted marketing campaigns: Use the insights from your journey maps to create marketing messages that align to specific needs and pain points of your distinct customer personas. For example, marketing campaigns that call out known customer frustrations and present solutions or new improvements.
- Offer personalized health plan solutions: Beyond the technical details of customer touchpoints, customer journey mapping often reveals insights on where customers have unmet needs in terms of your actual health plan offerings. Use these insights to improve and expand your health plan offerings, create solutions that cater to specific customer needs, and delivering targeted marketing messages that suggest plans that are appropriate for a specific customer.
- Enhance member onboarding: The enrollment and onboarding stages are common sources of frustration and friction in customer journey mapping. Streamline the process by creating step-by-step guides for how to sign up or complete the application process. Improve the process by digitizing applications or simplifying the paperwork. And create clear onboarding communications that make it easy for new members to understand their coverage and benefits, leading to higher utilization, satisfaction and retention.
- Optimize your website and digital channels: As customers’ preferences increasingly shift toward digital-first experiences, improving your website and digital channels will almost certainly be one of the most valuable ways to enhance your CX.Simplify navigation paths to key content and resources on your website. Review and refine your digital content to ensure it is relevant and useful for your personas and their needs. Make sure you’re using social media platforms to engage your personas with both marketing communications and member educational information.
- Improve member support: When your members do encounter friction, ensuring a high-quality support experience can turn a negative experience into an overwhelmingly positive one. Focus on common reasons for contacting customer support and create optimized, streamlined support journeys. Train customer support teams to be more proactive in identifying and resolving member issues. And look to implement tools like live chat and AI-powered chatbots to deliver more responsive service, right when a member needs it.
How Toppan Merrill can help
Toppan Merrill helps MAOs prepare annual member-facing and marketing materials each year, so your sales force and membership have the necessary resources. From document creation and management to sales enablement, omnichannel communications, printing services, and more, we deliver best-in-class solutions that help you respond quickly to changes in regulations, member needs, and markets.
Learn more about Toppan Merrill Health Plans Member Communications
