CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield was named the top-performing insurer for customer experience in 2025 by Forrester, a recognition that comes as many insurers face declining scores across the industry.
CareFirst’s Chief Marketing Officer, Mack McGee, joined the Becker’s Payer Issues Podcast to share how the organization is rethinking its approach to member engagement and challenging long-held industry assumptions that change is too difficult to achieve. Below is an excerpt from the conversation.
Question: What do you think is key to successfully navigating marketing challenges within the health insurance industry and achieving sustained success?
Mack McGee: For too long, we’ve existed on the idea that things are too complex, whether it’s regulation, product design, or benefit design. We’ve got to challenge ourselves.
You’ve seen it in the startup world as companies come in and challenge the systems in place. Often what they’re doing is nothing more than simplifying. Culturally, we’ve really established, as we think about experience strategy and journey mapping for our members, this idea of moments of truth. When you identify those moments, how do you challenge them and create a better consumer experience than what we’re offering today?
Think about when people buy products up front. This is a basic interaction for us, but it’s one we’ve really got to think about. What are we doing to educate members in that capacity? For so long, we accepted things like providing a glossary of our own terminology as a way of educating consumers around buying. That’s not good enough. The fact that we even have to offer a glossary should tell us something about what we’re doing.
People are often buying for themselves or for others in our world. How do you create better education and shopping experiences that account for that? We’ve seen a big lift just in the way we talk with members or potential members during the purchase process. We’re really trying to work with our partners on how we scale those efforts to bring that experience to members as they purchase, knowing that at the very outset of our relationship, it’s going to set the tone.
Then we look at other moments of truth, like when people call in to estimate costs for procedures or when they receive an EOB. What does that EOB look like? What is the language we use? We’re trying to think about those pieces and adopt this idea of being simple, clear and human. We’re challenging ourselves across the journey to find anywhere we’re not living up to that and how we can meet the opportunity to be simple, clear and human.
We’re taking this on internally in so much of what we do, as well as in the people who are answering the phones at the end of the day. Our folks do a phenomenal job. I’d argue that so much of the success you’re seeing right now is because of those interactions with people who call in looking for guidance and help in really vulnerable moments, whether they’re dealing with something health-related or financial. Having someone they feel they can trust to talk to is critical.
