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?