Most payers struggling to provide a good digital experience for members, study finds

Payers are lagging behind other industries that use technology to offer seamless digital experiences to customers, and it's costing them money and members, according to a new study from Forrester and Smart Communications.

The findings published June 15 supplemented existing research with survey questions given to member decision-makers working for payers from February to March.

Seven key takeaways:

1. Fifty-seven percent of payers said it's challenging or very challenging to provide a seamless digital experience throughout a member's journey.
   
   
2. Most payer executives describe their digital experience offerings as basic, and members agree. Because of this, phone calls are the best-rated channel for communicating with payers, but 51 percent of members are dissatisfied with their phone interactions.
   
   
3. Less than 40 percent of payers track in-journey and end-of-journey metrics, and therefore don't have an understanding of their members' journey.
   
   
4. Nearly 50 percent of payers said they don't understand the effect digital experiences have on their key business metrics and they don't track or can't react to members' emotions while engaging with them, meaning they cannot identify and address pain points and improvements.
   
   
5. Sixty-three percent of payers said their top member priority is to better connect journey touchpoints to improve experience. To do that, 61 percent plan to improve interoperability across back-end systems, 60 percent plan to improve relevance and personalization, 60 percent want to increase customer lifetime value and 60 percent want to improve revenue per member.
   
   
6. Payers are failing at member experience because only 26 percent prioritize member journeys by importance, 29 percent say it's easy to find information on their website, 25 percent test the usability of member-facing systems before deployment and 27 percent have a single system or data source that holds all information about a member.
   
   
7. Among ongoing plans and those for the next three years, 68 percent of payers say they are consolidating apps and systems, 65 percent say they are centralizing member preference management, and 59 percent are improving language clarity in communications.
   
   
8. Virtually all payers agreed that improving the member experience would result in better cross-selling opportunities, health outcomes and retention.

Read the full report here.