FREEDyourMind

Customer Satisfaction with Health Insurance Websites is Dismal

First, I'll share the results of our 2011 Healthcare Benchmark:

Two things jumped out at me about today's report, which is available for free download on our website.

1. Customer satisfaction for health insurance websites is dismal. I mean, dismal. On a 100-point scale, the average of all the health insurance websites we measure is 51. Compare that to pharma sites that get a 76 or to hospital and health system websites that get a 78. By any measure a 51 is BAD. Now, we definitely have individual health insurance clients that do very well. The individual company scores within the health insurance benchmark range from 30-79, which is a huge range.

But what that tells me is that it is possible for health insurance websites to do well. It is possible to crack the code of what customers want and need from a health insurance website. We can't just say "all health insurance websites perform poorly in terms of satisfaction, and there's nothing we can do about it," because some do quite well.

Moreover, if you look at the individual site that got a satisfaction score of 79 and compare it to the individual site that got a score of 30, the customers of the higher-scoring site report being FAR more likely to return to the website, recommend it, and purchase/service policies online instead of through a contact center (which saves a ton of money).  If the low-scoring health insurance websites out there could raise their satisfaction by even five or ten points, they would see tangible, measurable impacts on the bottom line. If they could get their scores up into the high seventies and in line with industry leaders, the sky's the limit.

I believe that customer satisfaction can be transformative to a business. More than just believing it, we have nearly two decades of evidence that when measured correctly, satisfaction predicts the future financial success of a company. It kills me that not every health insurance website in the country is measuring satisfaction, not to mention every hospital, every pharma site, every health product site, every health information site. All of these kinds of healthcare-oriented business could realize huge benefits (either in terms of cost savings, loyalty building, or revenue increases, depending on the business model) from a laser-sharp focus on satisfaction. And by the way, not only on their website (though I think for many organizations, it's such a natural place to start because it's so easy to collect data), but also in their contact center, on their mobile apps and m.mobile sites, in location (when appropriate) and anywhere else they interact with customers.

2. The other thing that really struck me was that the gap in satisfaction between public and private-sector health information sites is pretty narrow. Wouldn't you think that private-sector sites would knock government and nonprofit sites out of the water? Complaining about the government (especially about healthcare: no matter what your position is on the healthcare debate, you are probably unhappy with the way the government is handling it!) is practically a national past time. Not to mention the government has more rules and regulations, fewer resources, and less flexibility. And yet the private-sector outscores them by only one point.

This says more about the public sector than the private sector. It's not that private health information sites are doing poorly in terms of customer satisfaction, it's that the government and nonprofits have really made tremendous strides in the past decade to close the gap. The highest-scoring individual sites in both categories (public and private) is an 86, a score that is on par with Amazon, Google, and the websites with the highest satisfaction across all industries.

You can get the report on our website and read more about the other categories, what kinds of companies were included, and what the ranges of scores are.

Any surprises in this report for you?

Are Healthcare Websites Sick?

As the debate on healthcare continues, we decided to look at the healthcare websites that we measure at ForeSee Results and see how they are meeting the needs of consumers.  You can download the full report here.

Why look at consumer satisfaction of healthcare sites?  Well, as the debate goes on, one thing is certain, healthcare costs a lot of money.  And one way to reduce and manage some of those costs is better use of technology, for example, improving the quality and effectiveness of the healthcare websites.  The web brings us the opportunity of a win-win that is rarely available in other channels.  The first win is providing more information to citizens when they need it, anytime from anywhere you can get to the internet.  More information that is more readily available to consumers is a big win for consumers.  The second win is cost.  By providing more information, be it educational information about symptoms of a disease, potential side effects of a drug, information about the services provide by a hospital or information about deductibles and co-pays of your health insurance, we can lower the cost of providing the information to consumers.  A more informed consumer will make better health care decisions and lower the total cost of the servicing of that consumer.  A win - win!

So, how did the healthcare sites we measured do.  First of all, we surveyed more then  40,000 consumers who visited these healthcare sites in October and we utilized the proven methodology of the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) that was founded at The University of Michigan to measure the consumers satisfaction with the websites and how it would impact the consumer's future behavior.  We segmented the sites into four categories and their satisfaction scores are as follows:

• Government Health Information Sites     79
• Pharmaceutical Sites                           78
• Hospital Sites                                      73
• Health Insurance Sites                          64

The aggregate across all sites was 75.  To put these numbers in comparison, we look at 80 as the threshold for a very good site.  On average, the over 700 sites measured everyday by ForeSee Results, resulting in over 1 million completed surveys per month, score a 72, 4% below the healthcare index.  Not bad! 

The sites measured were wide ranging in their success to date, with scores as low as 42 and as high as 86.  86 is the same score that web leaders Amazon and Google obtained in their most recent published ACSI report.  Very impressive results from some of these healthcare sites.

I applaud all the sites (even the ones scoring in the 40's) because the first step to improvement is to measure.  You cannot manage what you do not measure.  And if you don't measure it you won't know if you improved.  So those low scoring sites are at the beginning of a journey that is bound to take them nowhere but up.

So, does satisfaction really matter for these sites?  Well, we talked about the win-win earlier, but lets take another perspective on it.  When we looked across those 40,000 consumers surveyed in October on these healthcare sites, we see that there is huge payback for high satisfaction.  When we look at the consumers who scored 80 or higher and compare them to those that scored 69 or lower, across all the sites, we see that the highly satisfied consumer is:

• 139% more likely to return to the website
• 169% more likely to recommend the website to others
• 153% more likely to use the website as a primary resource for interacting with the healthcare organization

This is truly a huge payback for satisfying your customers and results in the win-win, more information and services at a lower cost.

St. John's Use of Customer Sat Metrics

Check out the recent article about the value of measuring customer satisfaction online, written for Health Leaders Magazine by Pam Hedman at St. John Health System, a group of 8 hospitals and more than 125 medical facilities in Michigan. St. John is a client of ours–they’ve been measuring customer satisfaction online for about four years now, and wanted to share how customer satisfaction metrics helped them figure out that:

• the composition of site visitors was entirely different than what they expected, requiring changes to the site to address the needs of very specific audiences that weren’t previously considered significant
• improvements      to search more than to any other area of functionality would have the      greatest ROI
• improvements needed to be made to a transactional component of the website, resulting in a 138% increase in site traffic and a much better understanding of what was driving customer acquisition and retention.

Pam also talks about how she used customer satisfaction data to justify budget decisions and secure the funding she needs for web initiatives. Thanks, Pam, for the great article!