Customer Touchpoints: The More, the Better for Health Insurance Providers

One of the most basic ingredients for successfully improving the customer experience is actually providing opportunities for interaction. It’s simple: You can have the most sophisticated analytics in the world, but if you have nothing to analyze, it will be impossible to unearth insights that will improve your customer experience.

Omnichannel touchpoints not only provide more customer data, but they encourage relationships and, therefore, brand loyalty. This is true for all industries, but research shows having multiple options for interaction can make all the difference for insurance providers in particular.

A study of 2,000 health insurance customers found that “interaction options” is one of the three most important factors to customers when it came to choosing a health insurance provider. This finding is impressive on its own, but what’s even more surprising  is that “interaction options” out-ranked “brand” in terms of differentiators.

Additionally, the study found that customers are even willing to pay more for additional interaction options. I found this to be both validating and shocking for a few reasons. First, it confirms a belief that we have at Pearl-Plaza: you need to make it easy for your customers to interact with you whenever, wherever, and however they want.

Second, there has been a lot of talk recently that digital is taking over. While that may be true to a certain extent, this study found that in actuality, customers still want the choice between digital and traditional interaction options, because they prefer different touchpoints for different conversations. For example, customers said they generally prefer digital touchpoints for simple interactions like changing contact information, but they prefer a telephone call to address larger and more complex concerns.

Of course, providing all these touchpoints can get down-right expensive and it can be challenging to provide the same level of service across a variety of touchpoints.

This is a legitimate business concern, but in light of these recent findings, it is clear that having multiple methods of interaction is a differentiator for health insurance customers. Touchpoints can be costly, but failing to provide customers with the service they want is even more risky.

Healthcare is an incredibly personal industry and choosing a health insurance provider can be especially stressful for customers. Therefore, it’s even more important to make customers feel heard and cared for, while also allowing them to reach out in the way they feel most comfortable.

To learn more about what customers want from their customer experience, check out the 2018 CX Trends Report!