Great Health Insurers Need Great Customer Service Options
What You Need to Know
About half of health plan enrollees think of the call center as the primary plan communication channel.
For the enrollee, improving customer experience means improving the call center.
Well-designed digital self-service tools may help, by reducing the load on the call center.
Navigating a health crisis is an incredibly emotional experience — a truth the pandemic has brought home to millions of people. It’s no surprise, then, that those looking to communicate with their health plans want to know they can still talk to a real, empathetic, and insightful human being on the other end of the line.
That’s one of the main takeaways from a new survey of 3,000 health plan members. Despite widespread advances in digital health technologies, nearly half told us they still prefer the call center as their primary health plan communication channel. Furthermore, three of the four top responses about what members felt would improve engagement with their plans involved call center experiences, including shorter hold times, customer service reps (CSRs) with relevant information, and personalized recommendations.
When you, the agent or broker, get complaints about the health plans, many of those complaints may begin with stories about long periods spent on hold.
Unfortunately, new and rapidly evolving challenges make delivering successful call center experiences difficult just when the plans’ members need them the most. A historic labor shortage has made it harder to recruit and retain workers in a profession already rife with turnover (up to 45% across all industries). The shift to remote work environments has revealed shortcomings in customer experience technology and workflows. And an increase in outsourcing threatens to exacerbate existing legacy system inefficiencies and process disconnects.
So how can the health insurers you work with efficiently and effectively meet the demand for better call center experiences? The key is understanding that these experiences must go hand-in-hand with digital self-service options. Rather than replacing call centers, these digital options can relieve some of the pressure placed on them, reducing long hold times and creating more time for CSRs to connect with members facing stressful health and financial challenges.
Digital Self-Service and the Call Center
The pandemic accelerated a mass adoption of health tech by consumers, providers, and payers alike. But health plans need to recognize that investment in new technologies doesn’t mean leaving the human aspect of call centers by the wayside.
For instance, new data suggests that nearly 80% of US contact centers plan to deploy artificial intelligence (AI) in the next three years. But on its own, today’s AI can’t replace a real person or accurately analyze the complexities of human emotion. Case in point: We all know how far a shared laugh can go to ease stress. A recent report shows that AI just can’t compete with actual CSRs in this type of meaningful human connection.
