Mar 14, 2010
Will CIGNA free its customers of “insurance-ese?”
I’ve noticed recently that CIGNA is making a lot of noise about their Customer Exeperience, and when I spotted the press release about ‘shattering industry stereotypes with crystal clear customer communications’ I knew I had to share.
Before I begin, I have to admit I don’t quite see the triggering need CIGNA uniquely solves for its members. If we asked them “What problem are you solving that’s unique to CIGNA?” I wonder what the answer might be. Since the success of any customer experience lies in if – and how well – you solve a need, problem or desire for your customers, knowing what you solve is the first step of any customer experience.
However, that being said, I DO think they’ve laid out a terrific approach to strengthening the communication and service elements of the experience they provide to patients/customers.
CIGNA set up a Customer Experience team whose mission is:
To help individuals enrolled in CIGNA plans achieve their health goals with helpful information, trusted support and excellent service. To do that we must: communicate simply, consistently, and in ways they find personally relevant, compelling and easy to understand.
It’s a great idea. They’ve started to tackle is the insurance-ese we’ve all fought with (remember how we talked about making customers jump through linguistic hoops?), and they’ve redesigned their Explanation of Benefits to help their customers understand where the money’s going.
What I like so much about the CIGNA approach is that they’ve articulated why they’re changing, what the plan is, and what’s been done so far. I like that the changes they’re working on should strengthen their experience while improving financial performance – fewer questions and problems will drive down the cost to serve customers. And I imagine there was some candid fact sharing in the conversation that triggered this effort, about how they got to where they are.
Of course, what really matters here is how these new policies impact CIGNA customers and CIGNA performace. I did a few Twitter searches to see if any CIGNA members were talking about these new changes. Most of what I found was other PR people tweeting about the press release that caught my eye. So it remains to be seen how customers will react to these changes. What do you think? Are you a CIGNA customer have you been helped by the new customer experience mission?
Yes, I’m a CIGNA customer for medical, dental, and vision care. The explanation of benefits is SO much easier to read. It’s explained in real English. It’s easy to follow. “Kudos” to CIGNA.
Great news, Elizabeth. Changing an Explanation of Benefits(EOB)takes commitment from legal, marketing and clinical folks – an important lesson for those who think service and sales people have the biggest impact on customer experience. Appreciate you stopping by and sharing your point of view. LCI
Linda-
Enjoyed reading your comments on CIGNA’s efforts to eliminate “insurancese” — and as you suggest, it’s part of a bigger initiative to better connect with the people we serve.
When I was first brought to CIGNA in 2008 to create our customer experience office, my team spent our first 90 days identifying what was truly causing dissatisfaction and what problems were we really trying to solve. We realized quickly that our use of jargon was a huge dissatisfier across many, if not all, of our touch points.
I often wonder how many questions, or problems, go un-asked or un-raised, simply because people couldn’t understand the jargon. That’s the problem we set out to solve. Let’s increase levels of understanding so that people can really focus on the important things – like their health.
Since then we’ve been working on re-writing our communications materials using the “Words We Use” (our guide to plain language) in everything we do from the annual enrollment guide to our Explanation of Benefits statements. As a result we’ve seen customer understanding and satisfaction of our materials increase by more than 100%. It also will reduce the volume of service calls for things like explaining our Explanation of Benefits so that callers and service people can focus on solving real problems and ensuring people are getting the most from the CIGNA health benefits.
We’re doing a ton of other cool things too – to solve for other pain points our customers have told us about. And we’ve built in some really great delighters too!
For anyone interested in CIGNA’s customer experience initiatives, please visit us on our webpage on CIGNA.com: http://newsroom.cigna.com/press_kits_detail.cfm?presskit_id=12&item_id=33&press_section_id=1810
Ingrid, congratulations to you and your team at CIGNA. I hope everyone took note when you said “As a result we’ve seen customer understanding and satisfaction of our materials increase by more than 100%. It also will reduce the volume of service calls for things like explaining our Explanation of Benefits” — a simple but not necessarily easy example of strengthening customer experience while finding money trapped in the business.
I look forward to hearing more – as I’m sure readers here will, too. LCI
Great stuff Linda – thanks.
I had the opportunity to see Ingrid speak at the North American Conference on Customer Management (http://bit.ly/1afL3c) last November, and I was impressed how dedicated the organization was to making positive changes. I was also impressed by how passionate Ingrid is about her role.
Changes started from the very top, which was important since so many different functional areas were impacted. The “words we use” part was probably the most memorable. I think there’s a lesson for almost every organization in re-thinking the language it presents to the customer. If the customer perceives something as jargon, it is jargon – so getting customer input/feedback at multiple touchpoints is critical.
I also took specific note of the stated goal that “every interaction must be helpful and every interaction must be simple.”
So thanks Ingrid, for helping make the world a little less tongue-tied and thanks Linda for reinforcing how the customers’ experience has a direct impact on the bottom line.
Nick Wassenberg
E.G. Insight
http://www.eginsight.com