How to Consolidate Member Experience Data to Boost Satisfaction

When Sarah Wechsberg, manager of voice of consumer and experience strategy at Blue Cross North Carolina (Blue Cross NC), joined the team at Blue Cross NC, the problem with her company’s member experience data strategy had already grown apparent.

The issue was not that the payer failed to listen to its members. In fact, Blue Cross NC listened to its consumers across multiple channels and leveraged various vendors to collect member experience data. Rather, Wechsberg and her team realized that the resultant member experience data was scattered throughout the organization.

"What we needed was a centralized place to listen to our members and a centralized place to better understand where we needed to go to drive experience metrics up to ultimately improve the experience for our members,” Wechsberg told HealthPayerIntelligence.

Wechsberg summoned a committee consisting of individuals from across Blue Cross NC’s departments to discuss this issue. It quickly became clear that this was affecting the payer’s overall member experience strategy and that by centralizing member experience data the company could reduce costs and improve member satisfaction.

“The consensus was: now we can do better, we can be better, we can be simpler, we can be more affordable,” Wechsberg explained. “We have to not just say that, but live and breathe it within our company, within our walls. The business case was relatively easy to get everyone on board with.”

Third-party consultants confirmed Wechsberg’s conclusion and helped the Blue Cross NC team assess what the business and technical requirements should be for the new centralizing tool. Importantly, Wechsberg noted that she was looking for a technology partner that aimed to be a thought leader in member experience.

The payer released a request for proposals and narrowed its options down to four vendors. Of those four, Wechsberg and her team chose the vendor that not only met all of their requirements, but that also aligned most closely with the payer’s internal values, which turned out to be Qualtrics.

The vendor took data from channels across the company and organized it through a single, omni-channel listening platform.

Using this platform, the payer can more accurately gauge its members’ experiences.

“We capture high-level experience metrics like customer satisfaction, ease and likelihood to recommend (NPS), and we also capture these metrics and their drivers within customer journey phases and channels,” Wechsberg explained. “This is all part of our experience measurement framework.”

Many payers collect high-level and transactional metrics. These data points will be key for payers in the coming years since CMS adjusted Medicare Advantage Star Ratings to rely more heavily on member experience measures.

The agency committed to phase-in these changes from 2021 through 2023, but once the adjustments are fully incorporated member experience will contribute approximately 57 percent of the overall Star Rating score. Patient experience and complaint measures alone will account for 36 percent of the Star Rating score, an increase from 20 percent.

As a result, payers are adjusting their member experience strategies and some experts are calling for changes in other areas of the industry such as the Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (CAHPS) survey.

While some of these data points are fairly ubiquitous in the payer industry, Wechsberg indicated that Blue Cross NC’s approach is unique in that it captures member experience data all along the member journey.

Knowing a member’s journey of care is essential to providing strong member engagement, a key component to enabling a positive member experience. By assembling data from different parts of the member’s journey of care, Blue Cross NC can more accurately identify opportunities for consumer experience improvements.

It took less than two months for the effects of centralized listening to become evident. Wechsberg watched the payer’s net promoter score increase and other customer experience metrics grow in a positive direction after implementing the platform.

The following year in 2019, the payer recorded data from more than 58 million digital and non-digital interactions with members.

Although the program was successful, the team encountered some challenges during the implementation process.

“When you have a big technology tool, one of the hardest parts is integrating different technologies so that the data can flow,” Wechsberg acknowledged.

In response to this challenge, payers that are pursuing an omni-channel listening system should expect to exercise persistence and patience throughout the process, she recommended.

“It's been a progression; it was not an unplug and plug back in situation. It has been a journey for us to continue to mature our program,” Wechsberg said.

“It's change management. You're asking various folks across the company to give up a partnership or a vendor or a tool that they're familiar with and to learn something new. So it’s about having the patience to set your colleagues up for success by giving them the resources that they need to be successful in this change, answering questions, being transparent, and having a really good enterprise mindset of ‘we're all in this together.’”

A key component of Blue Cross NC’s approach was to have proponents of the strategy in divisions across the company. The committee that had gathered to affirm the need for this centralized listening tool carried their vision for a consumer experience platform back to their teams, fostering companywide support for the effort.

“Seeking alignment across the enterprise is our number one strategy,” Wechsberg said.