You know the saying about taking a walk in another person’s shoes? If you’re in the business of providing health insurance plans, your marketing efforts need to start by donning more than just a new pair of shoes. To really understand how people find their way to your company, and also understand their experience once they’re there, you need a customer journey analysis to build a marketing strategy that improves your ROI.
What is a Customer Journey Analysis?
A customer journey analysis helps your health insurance company see your plans and product offerings through your customers’ eyes. It’s empathy in action and allows you to experience for yourself the sum of all experiences your customers have while interacting with your company. When you have that snapshot of the journey in hand, you can then analyze it in its full context to make any changes — from messaging to the products and services themselves. In the analysis, you’re looking deeply into how your customers’ journey plays out across channels — from online searches to product purchases, with the ultimate goal of using that data to make immediate actions to improve your customers’ experience.
A thorough customer journey analysis will analyze each step and aspect of customer interactions with your organization and combine those data with insights around customer satisfaction, loyalty, and business goals. Importantly, a customer service analysis can reveal waste along the journey to help you optimize your marketing budget while also improving the customer experience.
Analytics and Insights for Improved Customer Experience
One of the main tasks of a customer journey analysis is to understand your customers’ goals, and also understand what leaves them happy or unhappy. In this sense, it’s important to use the analysis to identify the gaps between what you think you’re delivering and what your customers are actually experiencing. This will help you identify ways to improve customer relationships and loyalty with your company.
For example, health insurance consumers are seeking simplicity, personalization, and peace of mind. Most insurance plans can be overwhelming to an average consumer so they respond well to companies that talk in understandable language and can make complex elements simple. They are increasingly seeking more control over their plans with higher demands for technology (i.e. telehealth) and plans that are more personalized to their circumstances. Ultimately, they are seeking confidence that they are adequately covered by a brand with a solid reputation. A thorough customer journey analysis will help you determine how successful your efforts have been, and where they’ve fallen flat, allowing you to see in detail which sequences of events lead a customer to a positive rating or not.
Ways to Improve Your Customers’ Journey
Here are some examples of ways you can improve your customers’ journey, although you might just discover insights that differ from these in your own analysis.
Identify Where Expectations are Not Met
Customers enter into an interaction with your health insurance company with certain expectations. When these interactions do not meet their expectations, pain points emerge in the customer journey. Look for places where potential or current customers have already verbalized their concerns, but also use your logic and empathy to identify and assess interactions with your company that haven’t resulted in complaints or negative reviews.
Find the trouble spot and work backward — is your customer reacting to something that’s happened with your company, or is he or she still triggered by something that occurred while with another company? Then, work to close the gap between expectations and reality.
Reduce Waste by Reducing Unnecessary Touchpoints
Another way you can quickly improve your customer journey is to work to identify any unnecessary touchpoints or interactions you are unwittingly dragging your customers through. Optimizing the process will help you reduce your total interaction cost — try removing an existing step that is no longer needed. Or, it may be what is needed for a smoother more efficient journey is an additional step that improves the experience.
Clock The Journey: Does the Time Warrant the Cost?
A final way that you can improve your customers’ journey is by analyzing the time your customers spend across the major stages of their journey. Break down the data further by understanding how long it takes users and visitors to move through underlying substeps. Is there a way you can make the time spent across the journey more appropriate for each stage?
Employers want to be able to deliver a well-rounded health insurance package to their employees. After all, healthy employees create healthy businesses. And, it can help with recruiting and retention. Cost is a big issue and will always get close scrutiny. They want to know what you are bringing to the table. By ensuring information — and information about your competitors’ packages — is readily available to potential customers, you can reduce the time they spend outside of your site comparing your products and services with that of your competitors’. Try and reduce the manual work your customers have to put in comparing plans outside of your site to optimize your content and streamline this portion of the customer journey.
The Definition of Success
A customer journey analysis will help you define what “success” looks like for you and your marketing efforts. You can start by first aiming to increase performance simply by doing well what your customers say they value most. Then, work to link each step of the customer journey experience in order to make it feel seamless and easy to navigate. Eventually, you’ll be able to cut costs by decreasing waste across the customer journey and reduce cycle times and time to market.