By Julie Miller
Increased expectations and a new era of consumer empowerment are forcing businesses across industries to reexamine the customer perspective and develop new strategies for creating frictionless experiences. Many health insurers recognize the need to better understand member attitudes and create empathetic solutions but face unique challenges that can seem particularly daunting.
Given the highly personal nature of healthcare, an additional layer of emotion – and occasional stress – often characterizes interactions between members and health systems, making it difficult to understand the complexities of the member experience. Nonetheless, it is essential that insurers optimize the member experience in order to foster member satisfaction and loyalty.
Using best-in-class analytics technology, health insurers can gain a deeper understanding of member feedback, position themselves to make strategic decisions and drive impactful improvements. To get started, insurers should focus on integrating member feedback from across channels, enriching insights at scale and using data to drive decisions.
1. Integrating Member Feedback from Across Channels
To optimize an analytics program and truly transform the member experience, insurers must first gain a comprehensive view of member feedback from across the various feedback channels. By processing a broader range of member interactions and increasing the sample size of feedback records upon which analysis is based, insurers can glean actionable insights that accurately reflect the attitudes, opinions, thoughts and perspectives of their members.
To ensure insurers are collecting feedback that represents the full scope of their membership base, they should look for a solution that can analyze a variety of both structured and unstructured data sources, such as member calls, provider calls, emails, chat, complaints, surveys, digital forums, social media, blogs, ratings and reviews and more, to become truly omnichannel.
A combination of text analytics and speech analytics will ultimately provide the information needed to understand the true meaning of member feedback and makes future analysis more effective. Furthermore, by equipping teams with insights that reflect the entire gamut of member interactions from across channels, health insurers can quickly and confidently make decisions that are based on an accurate, holistic view of the member experience.
2. Enriching Insights at Scale
After creating a comprehensive view of member feedback, insurers should turn their attention toward identifying patterns and themes. In order to do this successfully, an analytics platform must extract, tag and group relevant feedback into designated categories.
By leveraging advanced Natural Language Understanding (NLU) engines, insurers can navigate the complexities of human language and uncover the context behind member feedback beyond the specific words members use. An effective analytics solution will also be customized to the healthcare space, so drug names, procedures, coverage types and other industry terms are captured accurately. Once this step is complete, the analytics team can filter insights based on the desired area of exploration and enrich findings to further understand member emotion, effort, sentiment and intent.
Understanding the context of member interactions and evaluating how certain metrics impact satisfaction, loyalty and retention can reveal critical business insights and pinpoint the root cause of member complaints.
3. Using Data to Drive Decisions
Effective customer experience management will enable data-driven decision-making and fuel continuous business improvement. Whether investigating the root cause of member complaints, exploring ways to educate and empower members, or evaluating demand for a new plan or offering, an omnichannel analytics solution enables providers to identify relevant topics and issues, analyze member responses and develop a response that’s both empathetic and impactful. Additionally, providers can then use their platforms to evaluate the impact of changes to programs or policies.
Furthermore, an omnichannel analytics program enables insurers to continuously track member issues, implement necessary changes, predict drivers of positive outcomes and proactively reduce the occurrence of negative ones. When insurance companies operationalize insights based on member feedback, they’re giving members a seat at the table and making decisions that put the member first.
Get Started Today
As members continue to take ownership of their healthcare journeys and their expectations around service evolve, insurers must find new ways to educate, engage and support them. Neither technology nor data alone offers the answer. By employing an omnichannel analytics solution and equipping teams with a differentiated level of accuracy, granularity and actionability, organizations can truly transform the member experience.
Julie Miller is the vice president of product marketing for Clarabridge, the leading provider of Customer Experience Management (CEM) solutions for the world’s top brands. In her role, Julie leads a team of tech-savvy creatives to clearly articulate the business challenges that Clarabridge solves, explaining how the technology works and showcasing real and measurable value. Prior to Clarabridge, Julie held product marketing roles at companies such as Approva, acquired by Infor, Rosetta Stone and FireEye. With more than 20 years of experience, Julie is passionate about educating buyers to make informed purchase decisions.
The Editorial Team at Healthcare Business Today is made up of skilled healthcare writers and experts, led by our managing editor, Daniel Casciato, who has over 25 years of experience in healthcare writing. Since 1998, we have produced compelling and informative content for numerous publications, establishing ourselves as a trusted resource for health and wellness information. We offer readers access to fresh health, medicine, science, and technology developments and the latest in patient news, emphasizing how these developments affect our lives.
