Tealeaf Can Improve Health Insurance Buying Experience

The implementation of the Affordable Care Act created the need for states to develop Health Insurance Marketplace websites for consumers to compare and purchase subsidized health insurance plans. These marketplaces, or health exchanges, are open during each year's annual open enrollment period, creating a large flux of consumers shopping for individual and small business coverage plans. In turn, there was a sudden increase of potential customers visiting state exchange sites and insurance company's sites. 8 million enrolled in the marketplaces during the 2014 enrollement, while 11.7 million were expected to enroll during the 2015 open enrollment. When this peak was first met, both the federal and state marketplaces experienced well-documented difficulties with their technical interfaces, creating widespread customer struggle and financial distress. Many consumers struggled to buy a health insurance plan that they were required by law to have. These issues have continued as health insurance exchanges and companies work to improve the site infrastructure and web experience. Improving the customer experience is a priority for both health exchanges and healthcare insurance companies. Available customer experience analytics and tools, like IBM's Tealeaf Software, can play a critical role in improving the experience on these websites.

Healthcare Exchanges

The implementation of Obamacare has received a lot  of critisicm since it was established, as health exchange sites have been experiencing countless technical difficulties and shutdowns. Some of the struggles customers face on the exchage sites were outlined in this New York Times article. These types of customer experience problems are exactly the type problems IBM's Tealeaf technology was designed to help identify. If you can see the challenges that customers are experiencing on a healthcare exchange in buying insurance, then you have the opportunity to fix those issues.  Tealeaf was uniquely designed to provide that visibility and then able you to segment and prioritize the issues, so you can deliver a quality customer experience. 

Health Insurance Companies

Healthcare Exchange sites provide side by side comparison of health insurance plans and direct links to company websites.  The need for customers and employers to shop for health insurance online has increased the need for health insurance companies to provide a high quality shopping experience. How well does your online conversion rate compare to your competitors, and how can you improve? There are a number of healthcare insurance providers that do leverage Tealeaf today to track and manage the customer experience.   Consumers are becoming savier consumers of health insurance and they won't tolerate poor online experience. Let's look at a quick summary of the benefits that Tealeaf can provide both Healthcare Exchanges and Health Insurance providers.

Tealeaf Benefits for Health Care

1. Quickly resolve customer-experience problems by vieiwng a replay of the customer's session and addressing the problems directly. Instead of listening to complaints or asking users for feedback on surveys, proactively view the customer's experience.  
2. Prioritize customer experience issues by using Tealeaf's unique customer experience analytics to answer not only quantitative data questions, but also a qualitative analysis. Then use that data to prioritize the issues having the greatest impact to your site. 
3. Track your common technical issues with Tealeaf and be alerted when issues begin to arise, so you can resolve them quickly. Arm your call centers with the ability to track and replay user sessions, so they are truyly able to help customers when issues arise.
4. Understand customer behavior to increase conversions. Understand where in the process users struggle. Why were they unable to find a policy that meets their needs? Why did they load a plan in your cart and then abandon it.

To learn more about how to optimize your web/mobile site to deliver a better online experience for your customers click on the button below to download the Customer Experience best practices whitepaper. 

If your interested in discussing ways to improve the customer experience in the health insurance market, please leave a comment below or send an email to info@pereion.com.