IDC Health Insights’ PlanScape Outlines Best Practices for Customer Engagement Strategies

• New IDC Health Insights PlanScape outlines customer engagement strategies for healthcare payers

“Customer fear of health insurance companies affects success when adopting the semi-retail approach to interacting with the member/patient,” said Rivkin, Research Director for Payer IT Strategies at IDC Health Insights. “This semi-retail interaction approach is now possible technically, but culturally difficult. Engaging customers to develop a trust with their payer equivalent to the trust found with their medical providers is a lofty goal, but this is the partner-in-care customer experience (CX) desired by payers.

“As health insurance benefits and pricing become commoditized through the Accountable Care Act (ACA), the customer relationship becomes paramount for payers,” Rivkin continued. “There is emerging demand for an integrated customer engagement strategy that enables automated interactions, shared communications, and appropriate transaction and information transparency to the tripartite (the health plan, the provider, and the consumer). Recently, payer engagement has also expanded into social networking and connected device adoption as engagement infuses itself into a customer’s daily life in the context of the Internet of Things.”

While traditional CRM software is being tweaked for the payer market, IDC Health Insights asserts there will be a transformational breakout of new payer-specific CRM applications. These breakouts will seek to address the traditional “member” claim/enrollment/payment administrative data, along with the “patient” care coordination, behavior, event, mental health, health record, and psychographic profile data to drive administrative and clinical real-time reaction through dynamic real-time segmentation. While no true native payer-CRM application exists today, the need for such an application is great, and the market is responding to this demand.

IDC Health Insights asserts that this new personalization must be tempered by maintaining a healthy respect for privacy and security, or the customer experience (CX) could go from a payer/patient health partnership, back to the adversarial claims-based days of the past. “Customers now have choice and will switch payers if their experience deteriorates; they expect more, like other retail or financial experiences they have,” Rivkin concluded.

The new IDC PlanScape outlines specific customer engagement tactics payers should consider in order to gain consumer trust and loyalty. It additionally offers a three tiered approach, and over a dozen tactics with essential guidance to enable effective customer engagement, which is rooted in the philosophy that focusing on what matters most to your customers is the cornerstone to long term success.

To arrange a one-on-one briefing with Jeff Rivkin, please contact Sarah Murray at 781-378-2674 orsarah@attunecommunications.com. Reports are available to qualified members of the media. For information regarding purchasing reports, contact insights@idc.com; reporters should email sarah@attunecommunications.com.

About IDC PlanScape
IDC PlanScape reports help to assure business value is recognized from technology by developing a technology initiative that is aligned with business goals, scoped to succeed, and properly resourced. By helping technology leaders make the case for a technology initiative, recognize unique resource requirements, and identify risk factors, IDC PlanScapes mitigate the greatest risks associated with technology initiatives.

About IDC Health Insights
IDC Health Insights assists health businesses and IT leaders, as well as the suppliers who serve them, in making more effective technology decisions by providing accurate, timely, and insightful fact-based research and consulting services. Staffed by senior analysts with decades of industry experience, our global research analyzes and advises on business and technology issues facing the payer, provider and life sciences industries. International Data Corporation (IDC) is the premier global provider of market intelligence, advisory services, and events for the information technology market. IDC is a subsidiary of IDG, the world’s leading technology, media, research, and events company. For more information, please visit www.idc-hi.com, email info@idc-hi.com, or call 508-935-4445. Visit the IDC Health Insights Community at http://idc-community.com/health.