Experience – Page 2

The Customer’s Point of View — Offering A Superior Online Experience

July 15, 2013 by bobyurkovic

In a changing world that is continually influenced by technology, fads and devices of convenience, health plans recognize that their customer relationships are forever evolving. Although the variables are always in motion, there is one constant that demands our focus — health plans must offer a superior customer experience.

As today’s customer service environment increasingly moves toward self-service, learning how to maintain a personal touch as we shift from people to technology is important. Although staying at the forefront of health care may seem complex, it boils down to a very simple solution — understanding the health plan members’ needs relative to the convenience they are accustomed to in virtually every other industry. With this understanding in mind, innovative solutions are the vehicle to driving member satisfaction and garnering loyalty, not to mention making a true improvement in quality of life.

The brutal truth is that most health plan members view their customer service experience as sub par, ranking last among all other major industries, according to a 2009 Forrester report, written by Elizabeth Boehm and titled “Health Plans Face a Member Experience Crisis.” As the report states, “It turns out that customer satisfaction decreases as consumers interact more with their health plan.” The report’s findings also show that members believe their “health plans make things more complicated than they need to be.”1 The question to ask is: How can we make health plan interactions easy, while providing a superior customer service experience?

IT’S AN ONLINE, SELF-SERVICE WORLD
Because we are a mobile society, information has to follow us in our busy lives and not the other way around. Although a health plan’s point of connection with its members occurs in three ways — through their online experience, call centers and mailed printed matter — it is the online experience that has become the primary focus for customer service delivery. Health plans are beginning to use the Web, mobile technology and kiosks to provide the information world to their members on their own terms.

Those of all ages have been able to enrich their lives by connecting to the online world. In fact, as we age and find our physical mobility becoming more limited, reaching out to the online world provides new opportunities for community connections. This is especially true for seniors who are learning to use online social networking as a way to find old and new friends. Instead of walking to the local coffee shop to meet friends and family, they can now chat online, thereby eliminating all physical barriers.

While the online world offers many advantages, using it to its full potential can be challenging. Creating a superior customer service experience requires skills in human factors as well as a comprehensive understanding of each audience. Health plans can realize customer service improvements by focusing their efforts on strategic, up-stream activities such as focus groups, usability testing and user experience architecture that will ultimately define the components of a superior experience.

RULES OF ONLINE USE ARE CHANGING
Now that health plan members are beginning to expect and even demand online options, the rules of customer service are changing. Today’s health plan member does not have the time or patience to figure out complex forms and processes. They expect access in real time, along with smart applications and dashboards, to help them make decisions. In addition, they want an interactive experience that engages them with others and immerses them in a supportive community rather than the stand-alone, impersonal pedestals of Web sites with complex navigational mazes that seem to hide information.

In other words, health plan members want a system that is easy to use, and they want to be in control. The table below shows how member expectations have changed over time:

ACTUALIZING INNOVATION
In order to drive customer service innovation, health plans need to define their many member interaction points and deploy focus groups that address the following questions:

What do we need to improve?
Where do we need to be?
How do we improve production to give our members conveniences already offered by other industries?

The lessons learned from these focus groups should be used to build a better model that includes improved online communications, concierge delivery, personalized communications, mobile technology and an expanded “HealthScape.” This will lead the way to an experience that is truly in tune with the customer’s needs.

Online Communications
What can health plans do to improve online communications? Hide the complexity by focusing on audience-centered design and create a simple user interface. This essential step can be accomplished by re-thinking processes in a way that transforms them into a customer point-of-view. Look at the logistics of building your online sites by using a “shopping mall” model that allows for entry at one portal and gives access to many areas. Combining the ports of entry into one area reduces the risk of a fragmented experience.

Navigating through an online maze is the number one frustration for users in all industries. In fact, customers would prefer to take many easy steps to gather information rather than a few difficult steps. Think of an encyclopedia as your model. Although you usually cannot get to a subject in two turns of a page, having the proper topology and guidance system makes it easy to find the information you need.

Concierge Model
Many hotels offer a superior customer service experience by using concierge services. They do not expect their customers to know how to find their way in a new town, who to call for reservations or how to use the hotel’s facilities. Concierge services are provided as a guide for navigating through unknown or complex structures.
Both outsiders and insiders often view their health plan as a complex structure; however, a self-service concierge model can be designed to navigate through this complexity. For example, customer service can take away the logistics issues that members suffer through when encountering a health event. If there is a hospital located many miles away that provides better quality for a better price, then the health plan should provide travel services so the member can focus on what is important to them — their health — and not on making travel arrangements. Taking logistic pain points out of the process enhances the customer service experience during a stressful health event.

Personalized Communications
Offering personalized communications as a standard across all platforms is a best practice in other industries and should be a standard practice for health plans as well. Enrollment forms, plan summaries and physician directories should include member information and data to assist in the decision making process. A personalized document is more appealing and garners better responses than a standardized form letter.
Some payers, such as Regency Blue Cross Blue Shield, no longer send out a traditional Explanation of Benefits. They have replaced them with easy-to-understand and personalized health statements embedded with marketing information. This communication now serves as an engagement tool that is useful to the member while providing an opportunity for the plan to sell additional services.

Mobility Anytime
Some estimates show that up to 50 percent of people will have smart phones within one year. Whether standing in line, traveling or waiting for children to finish school activities, people want the ability to connect online in real time. Health plan tools should take advantage of this technology and make smart applications available that enable members to easily manage their care.

Additionally, kiosks have been a major self-service delivery point in the banking industry for many years. Conveniently located, easy to use and available at all hours, customers love the convenience. Kiosks also entered the health care space a few years ago, offering applications such as way-finding and registration. Now is the perfect time for health plans to expand their kiosk capabilities by offering new, focused smart applications.

The HealthScape is Expanding
Health plans can no longer afford to limit their online customer service offerings to just health events and transactions. As health care priorities shift, members who previously used their plan’s Web site to find a new provider or review a claim now want the ability to do more. In fact, there is a need for a new term that encompasses all of the moving targets demanded by today’s consumers. HealthScape is a new term encompasses the three segments of a successful health plan Web site:

Health Events and Transactions
Wellness
Lifestyles

The primary challenge for health plans is to tie together all three segments into a uniform, connected Web site that provides a superior customer service experience for increased loyalty.

The following diagram shows the information that should be provided within each segment of the HealthScape:

HealthScape

Many Web sites began by providing member services in the health events and transaction segment of the HealthScape. Inquiries pertaining to claims, providers and benefits are the most utilized features of this segment. However, with the increasing popularity of HSA and HRA plans that are designed to lower costs by motivating members to stay healthy and follow wellness guidelines, some plans are adding wellness and lifestyle segments to their Web sites in order to provide a more robust user experience.

The wellness and lifestyle segments of the HealthScape can be linked through a variety of shared experiences. For example, when evaluating data aggregation, health plans can provide their members with high-tech wellness tools such as the Nike Triax Elite, pedometers, the Health Buddy, GlucoPhone, blood pressure monitors and a myriad of other devices designed to acquire personal health information. The health plan can then aggregate this data and make it available online so members can monitor their fitness and make any necessary lifestyle changes. The health plan can also offer incentives based on the member’s progress.

Another HealthScape experience that crosses multiple segments is “at home care.” This type of care increases quality of life while decreasing hospital costs. For example, at home care for diabetes includes the use of equipment to monitor blood sugar levels and medication delivery to patients while in the comfort of their home. Uploading the test results to an online portal offers the opportunity for physician review while results can be made available to the member.

A population that will play an increasingly important role in the HealthScape is that of the Millennials, also known as the “ME” generation. This group, ages 18–29 years old, numbers between 80 and 95 million. They work hard, play hard and consider their lifestyle when making health care decisions. In fact, they will even schedule business events to fit in with their lifestyle, such as scheduling a business meeting around a yoga class.2 The Millennials know their priorities and, as young people, they are tech savvy, “always on” and only take “yes” for an answer. Given their youthful feelings of invincibility, the wellness and lifestyle segments of the HealthScape are their primary areas of focus. An incredible opportunity exists for health plans to provide them with advice on nutrition, healthy living, traveling and more.

As the use of health plan Web sites migrates from health transactions and events to wellness and finally to lifestyles, the HealthScape becomes “stickier” and member retention becomes less of a problem. The plans that limit their Web sites to health events and transactions will only have members visiting their site a few times each year. With such low interaction, retention is difficult because so many alternatives for information exist elsewhere and members will gravitate toward plans with more informative Web sites. However, by providing a well-designed HealthScape, members will visit more often to seek advice and participate in healthy living programs. This, in turn, promotes a higher quality of life and lower health costs.

TRANSFORMATION
Convenience, simplicity and robustness are the building blocks of a superior online experience. As in virtually every other industry, health plan members have become savvy users of technology. Health plans must transform their approach to customer service and remove the current disconnect between customer service and technology and focus on making online customer service easy to use while improving functionality and content.

The challenge? The challenge is creating a “big picture,” self-service platform that satisfies member needs while providing a rich online experience. The bar for customer service has been raised, and plans should view this time as an inspirational turning point or risk missing the opportunity to truly enhance the lives of their members. In fact, the health plan customer service experience should be designed with the following motto in mind: Partners for Life.

Embracing Big Data and Mobile Technology to Create a Better Healthcare Insurance Experience

June 12, 2013 by bobyurkovic

There are many different types of healthcare technology that have the potential to boost the bottom line for insurance companies while simultaneously improving the customer experience. Unfortunately, many health insurance companies have not yet fully utilized these technologies. Big data and mobile technology, including cloud-computing capabilities, can provide many different cost-effective, patient-centered, integrated healthcare payer solutions that both insurance companies and policyholders can appreciate. It’s time for insurance companies to embrace big data and mobile technology, if they haven’t already done so, in order to create a better healthcare insurance experience for all.

Big Data, Mobile Solutions and Health Insurance

As you may know, big data is a term that defines the large and complex sets of information that organizations are collecting in the digital age. As these sets of data grow, it becomes harder and harder to process all the data using the applications and database management software that an organization may traditionally have been utilizing. Since healthcare is the fastest growing industry in the world and is expected to grow and transform even more within the United States when Affordable Care Act provisions go into effect in 2014, health insurance companies have some of the biggest data challenges facing any organization in the 21st century. Many employers will require new healthcare payer solutions as of January 1, when the mandate requiring large employers to provide affordable health coverage to all fulltime employees goes into effect. The sets of data that health insurance companies are dealing with will only continue to grow as more people become insured and the population steadily increases, leaving a huge need for technology solutions to make this data as manageable as possible without negatively impacting revenues or damaging the customer experience.

What This Means for Healthcare Insurance Providers

Healthcare insurance technology consultants are already busy helping many of the leading insurance companies transform their technology systems so they can manage their data more efficiently and improve their customer centricity. Healthcare information consulting firms can help insurance companies embrace the kinds of technology that will help them create a better experience for their companies while improving their bottom line. The first step is deploying an electronic medical record system, which many companies have already done, but this is not nearly enough to handle the big data challenges around the corner. In order to provide accountable, cost-effective, patient-centered, integrated healthcare solutions, insurance companies must make a concerted effort to take advantage of the content they have at their fingertips and automate as many of their operations as possible to make the patient care process nearly seamless. Since this type of effort requires a strategic master plan to be successful, working with a consulting firm is advisable.

The Leading Big Data and Mobile Solutions for Healthcare

Different insurance companies may require different healthcare payer technology solutions depending on the needs of their customers and internal structure, but there are some solutions that may be universally beneficial for the healthcare industry overall. These include the digital integration of enterprise health information, mobile access to healthcare information for employers and employees, the embrace of cloud computing for managing large stores of data that can be accessed remotely and the automation of paper-driven processes so resources can be refocused on customer care. Insurance companies can also utilize big data to provide a clearer picture of healthcare outcomes so medical providers can improve patient care and refocus their attention on initiatives that improve patient lives while cutting healthcare costs nationwide. This new era of big data analysis will require new, skilled workers to answer the call, just as the transition will require experienced consultants to ensure a smooth process overall.

HealthScape Part 4

March 14, 2013 by bobyurkovic

The traditional interaction with payers has been around transactions. Find a doctor, pharmacy, look up my benefits, and look up a claim. This is a transaction layer in the consumer relationship. There is little opportunity to develop a relationship and generate consumer stickiness in this area. Consumers only go to the transaction layer to perform a transaction, which in a large payer, is about one to two times a year. The main reason that many members perform a transaction is because they are going through a health event, such as a sickness or medical condition, so members are already in a stressed state dealing with a personal or family health issue. Not the best time to generate a relationship. The best way a payer can generate a positive experience in this layer is to provide superior support for the member when needed. This translates to a flawless experience by offering a caring connection, managing administrative tasks and processes, and performing event logistics so members can focus on their health. To build productive relationships, payers need to go where the people are and when they are in a good state of mind.

The diagram below shows a representation of the HealthScape from a consumer perspective. There are three distinct layers around health and consumer involvement with the transaction layer being at the core. They are different in how often members interact in each layer.

HealthScape

In the transaction layer, people may interact several times a year with a payer performing a health transaction. In the wellness layer, people interact far more often such as one to two times a week depending in their personal plans for nutrition and exercise. In the lifestyle layer, there is potential for people to be involved in health everyday as it becomes part of a routine in a person’s daily living. In the lifestyle layer, a payer has the potential to achieve relationship nirvana – stickiness.

In the wellness layer, members are focusing on keeping, or getting to, a state of wellness. The big issues on their minds are nutrition, exercise, and healthy behaviors. They are focusing on their health to minimize the risk of being sick and to lead a productive life. The member starts to enter into a relationship with wellness providers and coaches to engage in healthy behaviors. Telephone coaching is an example of this. Wellness is one of many personal priorities a member manages so it may not be the top priority every day and throughout the day. For wellness to be embraced, a member needs to absorb a healthy thinking into their life on a daily basis; it has to be part of their lifestyle.

In a lifestyle layer, people interact, work, play and experience life every day. An example of health in the lifestyle layer, is the new devices that monitor our activity, sleep and nutrition. The Jawbone UP and Fitbit Flex are wearable devices providing biometric data to consumers throughout the day. The devices provide feedback to adjust consumer’s actions and behaviors in order to reach their desired goals. These devices are part of the wearer’s lifestyle and that lifestyle changes based on feedback they provide. If a person is at an office and sitting at a desk too long, an alarm goes off to let the wearer know they need to more active and move around. If this happens often, thinking is changed and a behavior formed leading to healthy outcomes.

Solutions in the lifestyle layer focus on supporting consumers in their quest for sustained healthy living.. It is important to help people approach health in a holistic manner and offer encouragement and tools in the areas of nutrition, exercise, stress, care, community, and healthy habits. Relationship maturity can blossom in the lifestyle layer. To assist payers in their vision to diversify, they can find opportunity in the lifestyle layer by offering tools to reinforce healthy behaviors and be more than providing health plans. The definition of health to a payer is about healthy living for members and not just paying a claim.

The same occurred in the banking industry. Years ago, banks just performed transactions such as deposit a check. Now banks offer rounded services such as financial planning for retirement, college, and family growth supporting a person throughout their life; supporting their lifestyle.

An extension of a payer’s offer could be to aggregate data from multiple biometric devices and offer services to their members such as a health dashboard with relevant content to support decision-making and behavior changes in pursuit of healthier living. As I mentioned under the engagement section, healthy behaviors lowers the causes for chronic diseases, which lowers medical costs in health care.

The Health Care Experience Part 3

March 12, 2013 by bobyurkovic

Experience + Job = Relationship
Let’s translate the concept to health care and engagement. Payers sell benefit plans that have become commodities. The payers “do the job” of providing benefits plans and services although the experience of purchasing and using them is less than desirable. Forrester publishes an annual customer experience index and health plans land in the poor to very poor range. There is no differentiation and a low barrier to change payers … and no relationship. Payers want to engage consumers and help them live a healthy life but consumers cannot be engaged at this stage; consumers need a relationship to become engaged. A relationship can be developed and nurtured once the experience and job to be done is high. At this stage, consumers are satisfied and open to a relationship with the potential to be engaged as the relationship develops. It makes sense to enhance the experience.

Let’s look at how payers process claims. We may be able to say they process claims efficiently, so the job gets done but how does it impact the experience with a member? A payer may say there is no member experience in this process; we just process the claims internally. They are right and wrong. They are right in that payers do not generate a member experience in this process? In lieu of a crafted experience, the member will start wondering what happened to my claim. Instead of thinking the process is going well, they may think the worst; we always do. So after a period of time, the member calls the payer to find out what is going on and the member is already at a frustrated stage. The call cost the payer three to five dollars. If we generate a member experience around the process, we can stop frustrating the member and not incur the cost of a call. What if payers provided a communication using a SMS or email message to advise members where their claim is in the process? Sound familiar? I love to see my tracking information from my Amazon orders to see how the order is progressing. Seeing activity or progress satisfies me in my wait for claims processing and results in a good experience for me. If payers communicated where a claim was as it traveled through the process, the member experience increases. They would know since the payer took the action first and generated a dialog around the claim event. This may sound like a reassuring voice such as, “Don’t worry, we are providing personalize attention to your claim.” Members would get to choose how much information they want and select their channel preference. It’s all about “me” in the world of the consumer. This is just one example of designing a good experience. With a positive experience and products that do the job; payers can build relationships with members through communications and interactions. This is the area that engagement is spawned.

To build relationships, payers should have to focus on the following:

Offer a product that does the job for consumers.
Provide a grand experience in two areas. A well designed user experience on all user touch points and also a tuned customer experience so that consumers are happy about interacting with the payer during their journey.
Extend their products to be more than benefit plans and also provide their members tools to help them in their pursuit of healthy living and enjoyable lifestyles. Do this and the “doing the job” indicator goes up in scale.

Building relationships aids in member engagement and increases retention. It is about the quality of the interaction and not quantity. The relationship is formed around common goals such as improving members health. If the interaction is pointless and without value, it becomes annoying to the member and the experience deteriorates.

Engagement is Good
Engagement, at a member level, has many benefits for, not only members, but for payers and the health system. At the engaged stage, payers can:

Modify member behaviors to lower causes of chronic diseases
Promote healthy living behaviors for members
Offer information and tools to help members make intelligent health decisions

Medical costs are increasing at an alarming rate each year so member health is a priority for payers and providers. The CDC says chronic diseases account for $3 of every $4 spent on healthcare and chronic diseases are preventable by modifying consumer behaviors. This is a perfect example of how consumer engagement solutions can help lower costs and decrease chronic diseases but a relationship must be built for this work. For payers to engage their members, they need to focus on two things: (1) the customer and user experience and (2) a product or service that performs what the member wants to do.

Consumer Centricity
Consumer centricity needs to be raised in priority just as cost management is a focus point for payers. Engaging members in healthy living and using self-service tools is important in lowering health costs and empowers the members in an era of consumer driven health care. So in the end, a sustainable solution to lowering health costs and having a healthy member base over the long term can be through consumer centricity. This approach takes time and is an investment in the health system and in its members.

If you are looking for low hanging fruit, focus on the customer experience. The fastest road to a good experience is remove pain points in services and products that touch customers … usability testing can provide shocking results. You can turn an annoyed customer into a satisfied customer by assessing online assets using a user experience discipline and updating the design based on the findings.

Some ideas are to offer consumer centered products and services aligned to personalized needs, tune customer experiences to build relationships, and engage members in healthy living and decision making with personalized programs. These are examples that can contribute to lower costs by improving member health and consumer engagement. Payers now have a raison d’etre and they remain relevant. Payer can use their big data repositories to help their members by delivering useful information and tools backed by a terrific experience. Why would it work? They took time to build relationships and trust with their members and shifted into a consumer mode of business. Moving to a consumer view is a graceful slide toward diversification since payers can provide solutions that accommodate members when they live the most; in their lifestyle.

How does this resonate with your experience at your payer? As a consumer, what are your expectations of your payer?

Connection between Experience and Engagement Part 2

March 8, 2013 by bobyurkovic

Doing the job
There is a need to combine experience and function into a consumer model and I believe there is a strong use for it in health care to achieve member engagement. An idea came to me after I read about the work of Clayton Christensen and a fellow researcher. It was an article on Milkshake Marketing from Harvard Business School published in 2011. Clayton’s claim is 95% of new products fail and companies need to look at products in the way that customers do, or how a product “gets the job done.” Jobs have functional, emotional, and social dimensions.

I was fascinated by this article and followed the role of a milkshake in the eyes of a consumer. The goal was to increase the sales of milkshakes. The study found that consumers bought the most milkshakes in the morning and for common reason. Consumers faced a long commute and needed something to make their commute more interesting. They were not hungry but would be by 10:00 am. The milkshake was thick so sucking through a straw gave them something to do. They were in business clothes and the milkshake was less likely to get their clothes dirty than a donut or bagel would … it was contained enjoyment.

Traditional marketing says to segment the market by demographics and product. Clayton’s argument was to segment according to jobs-to-be-done. Focusing on the job, they found that by increasing the thickness and adding chunks of fruit, they enhanced the job-to-be-done and sales increased. They also had another version, a treat for children with a thinner consistency so parents would not have to wait for them to finish it. This shows two jobs that needed to be done. Now add experience.

Experience
I noticed a correlation between a product’s job and the overall experience the person has with it. It seems more than just user experience (usability), but also involves the journey or customer experience of the event before use, during use and after use. I observed that products that were lean on features but robust on the experience were more likely to be adopted and succeed. The concept of consumers choosing packaging over content has been around for a while. We choose a laundry detergent because our family used it when growing up (brand) or the color of the package is striking (packaging). Not many people actually read and understand the chemistry of the ingredients (content). Maybe we are seeing a shift in consumer behavior and the new form of “packaging” is the experience. Personally, I sacrifice features to remove the hassles of product selection, purchase and use. To me, experience became the product differentiator if nothing more than to avoid adding frustration to my busy lifestyle. If a vendor has a useful product with a great experience, then I do not mind waiting on lines to get it either. Even the wait can turn into an interesting experience if we design the experience well.

The figure below shows a model for connecting the experience and functionality with consumer relationships.

Legend: Blue – product type, Red – consumer feeling, Green – consumer mode

We can use the engagement diagram to review three scenarios relating to the job-to-be-done and the customer experience.

Scenario 1 – High excitement and limited use

Product type Fad

Consumer feeling Excited

Consumer mode Courtship

A useful product that offers a great experience in purchasing and using it may show strong user adoption. The excitement may not be sustained over time as users realize the “fun” is gone and the usability of the product has waned. Remember the fads of yesteryear. Clothing can fit into the category of a fad. Articles of clothing that have lost their excitement include bleached jeans, penny loafers, and tie dye shirts. They were still functional, but a shift in the experience occurred. Experience can impact the functionality as well. If a style no longer creates a good feeling while wearing it, the clothing no longer “performs its job” to make the person feel good and it will be discarded for another piece of clothing. In this mode, you create a short-term relationship and the product seems more like a fad with a short product life cycle.

Scenario 2 – High use and limited experience

Product type Commodity

Consumer feeling Bored

Consumer mode Acceptance

A product such as phone service or cable TV from a cable provider that does just an OK job and provides a poor customer experience may not have a foundation for a relationship to develop. Forrester reports the customer index for cable TV providers is in the poor range. From a consumer perspective, most will put up with the cable TV provider and accept what they are given, but will jump to another provider at an opportunity if the product stops performing or if they are fed up with their experience. This industry has retention issues, which could be even more severe, were there more vendors offering services. The barrier to switching to another provider is low.

Scenario 3 – High use and high experience

Product type Valued

Consumer feeling Satisfied

Consumer mode Engagement

A service with great products and a satisfying experience, such as Amazon.com, provides a foundation on which to build a relationship … even online. Amazon ripped business away from brick and mortar stores and offers excellent customer service throughout a user’s shopping experience. They offer reviews of products, updates on orders, and an evolving shipping status in real time. The experience supports two tenants of consumerism … it is convenient and fast. Facebook is another example of a product that does the job without getting overly complicated and offers a good experience. Users of Facebook are truly engaged and we see this in how much time is spent on it. It has integrated into the user’s lifestyle … a powerful combination.

How do you think this concept applies to healthcare?

Is Customer Experience and Consumer Engagement linked? Part 1

March 7, 2013 by bobyurkovic

I call this health blog “Curved Roads”. Curved roads are not efficient; they take more tar to build. They are not the shortest way to a destination so they impact our gas use and they take more time to get somewhere. Yet, there is a grace and beauty in them as they follow the contours of the land and we enjoy them. Curved roads can offer an amazing experience for us. In healthcare, we forgot about the customer experience and we need some curved roads to remind us that efficiency is only part of the satisfaction equation. Consumer centricity needs to be embraced in a payer’s culture if payers wish to engage their members and providers.

LL Bean has been quoted in many industries. The L.L. Bean mission is to live this Golden Rule … “Sell good merchandise at a reasonable profit, treat your customers like human beings and they will always come back for more.” LL Bean’s definition of a customer is, “A customer is the most important person ever in this company – in person or by mail.” A simple understanding of consumer centricity. Do we treat customers like the most important person?

I’m going to spend some time over the next couple of weeks talking about this subject with a model that shows a connection. Are they connected?

An immediate answer comes to mind, “Yes, absolutely they are connected.” But how and why? What happens when you have a great product but a poor experience. Is it a commodity. Is experience the new differentiator? I have some ideas to share with you from a health care perspective.

Companies launch products and services to consumers with the thought that their product will offer so much value to the consumer without considering the bigger picture. It is a holistic view of the consumer experience that matters if consumer centricity is to be attained. The combination of a product’s functionally and the experience it offers sets a condition for potential consumer engagement and relationship development. Translating this to health care, it is important for payers in health care to focus on providing information and tools so members can do the job of managing their health while offering a connected experience to simplify and navigate the complex maze of health care.

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