relationships

Consumer Understanding and Intimacy Because Healthcare is Personal

September 11, 2013 by bobyurkovic

Describe healthcare from a personal view. Do terms such as fragmented, fractured experience, inconsistent communications, confusing, irrelevant information, and frustrating come to mind? Is healthcare a personal experience?

Questions arise from a consumer. “Don’t they know me yet? Why do I have to repeat entering the same information? What does this mean? Which one is right?”

Consumers place so much emphasis and energy on how to navigate through healthcare to the point that they hardly have time to focus on their health. Did you ever walk into a store and were overwhelmed by what you saw you forgot why you came in the first place? If health care were a collection of packaged goods in a store, we would walk out of the store.

What do consumers want from healthcare? Five basic words come to mind: Easy, consistent, coordinated, helpful, and connected. And if information and tools are required to make good decisions, they need to be relevant, useful, and personalized to me.

To address the consumer’s needs, we need four elegant solution engines and they form a consumer equation.

Consumer Insight + Customer Experience + Personalized Communications + Relevant Health Engagement

It is more than just adding four items; it is how those items are connected into an integrated consumer view of healthcare – the conduits and glue in healthcare. So, let’s choose one of the four and work our way through them. Why? It’s all about “me” in a consumer world and the “me’s” have choices in a b2c environment. Consumer centricity should drive the business for a payer as it does for CPG companies.

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.

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?