Customer engagement takes many forms, depending on the industry in question. For retailers and grocery stores, customers are actively looking to engage with the brand on positive terms, creating an ideal environment for connecting with the consumer base. For insurance companies, however, many customers hold distrust for the provider from the start, making customer engagement a steep uphill battle.
Through the leveraging of extensive customer data, IDC Health Insights believes that insurance companies now have the power to become a “partner in care” and build trusting relationships with customers.
“Customer fear of health insurance companies affects success when adopting the semi-retail approach to interacting with the member/patient,” said Jeff Rivkin, Research Director for Payer IT Strategies at IDC Health Insights and author of Customer Engagement Planning for Payers, a report detailing the process of building trust as an insurance provider. “This semi-retail interaction approach is now possible technically, but culturally difficult. Engaging customers to develop a trust with their payer equivalent to the trust found with their medical providers is a lofty goal, but this is the partner-in-care customer experience (CX) desired by payers.”
The commodization of health insurance through the Accountable Care Act has placed a demand on providers for an engaging customer relationship. These organizations had previously placed CX efforts on the back burner, and now must play catch-up to engage customers and personalize their consumer journey.
“Customers now have choice and will switch payers if their experience deteriorates; they expect more, like other retail or financial experiences they have,” said Rivkin.
These payers must now compare themselves not only to other companies within the vertical, but also to customer experience leaders as a whole. Innovators like Amazon and Apple have raised the bar in terms of CX, and customers have raised their expectations as a result.
Much of these heightened expectations are in regard to personalization of the customer experience; customers no longer respond to the “one-size-fits-all” marketing of the past, and forming a personal connection with consumers is key to success in any industry. The health insurance landscape is changing rapidly, and organizations will have to be agile to adapt to consumers and avoid being left in the dust.