Increasing positive customer experience while reducing costs in the booming dental insurance market
With today’s increasing demands for effortless engagement, Customer Service has become a strategy and not just a department. Today’s consumer demands transparency and a strong customer service culture. Negative customer experiences can not only consume administrative resources but can ultimately lead to lost customers.
Successful dental insurance administrators understand that retaining customers requires:
- Monitoring customer engagement
- Leveraging intelligent data analytics to understand customer behavior and improve operational performance
- Deploying proactive customer relationship management.
Creating a 5 star experience
As dental insurance administrators see rising numbers of consumers purchasing dental health plans, it is inevitable that some customers’ experiences won’t be up to par. In order to understand the breadth of customer satisfaction, dental administrators must implement automated quality measurements for member satisfaction. By creating key performance indicators (KPIs) to monitor and meet consumer expectations, dental administrators successfully engage customers across a number of demographic/generational variables.
5 action steps to gauge consumer perception and improve customer engagement
Payer organizations utilize different methods for assessing customer satisfaction and implementing action plans to improve the customer experience. CMS has created a Five-Star Quality Rating System in an effort to improve the quality of care and help consumers make more informed choices about their healthcare. This rating system is noted as a key strategy for many health plans to retain and expand their business. According to Vanessa Pawlak, a principal at Ernst & Young, LLP, health plans should take the following 5 action steps in monitoring customer satisfaction: 1
- Conduct parallel surveys and analysis, including yearly comparisons and adjustments based on their Medicare star ratings [or dental-specific KPIs].
- Focus on quality and consumer perception to improve member enrollment and retention.
- Build closer relationships with providers and create incentive plans for providers to collect data at the member level.
- Develop outreach-centered metrics aligned with their programs and business-to-consumer focus.
- Include cost and benefit impact across all measures while shaping a clear strategy for data management.
Effectively aggregate data and analytics into actionable insights
Integrated data analytics identify actionable data at the member level. Effective solutions empower payers to drill down to a granular level to expose key data. The actionable insights allow payers to identify consumer segments and direct appropriate outreach in the most effective and customer-centric way. By aggregating intelligent data, dental payers can customize their offerings for each customer, improve consumer engagement, and manage customer relationships consistently throughout the lifecycle of the relationship.
Modern customer relationship management solutions
Many dental insurance administrators are successfully leveraging streamlined technology for customer relationship management, reaping the benefits of advanced automation for sales, marketing, and dental customer service.
PLEXIS’ customer relationship management solution organizes and synchronizes data to optimize workflows and improve customer satisfaction. Modern dental health plan software, when combined with a customer relationship management solution, further improves the overall customer experience –allowing administrators to provide more effective and efficient service and ultimately retain and expand their business.
Learn more about the features of PLEXIS’ Solutions for Dental Plans and Dental Claims Processing
Sources:
1Pawlak, Vanessa. “4 Steps to Boost Your Medicare Star Ratings and Retain Your Customers.” http://www.managedcaremag.com/archives/2015/6/4-steps-boost-your-medicare-star-ratings-and-retain-your-customers