Phani Kanakala, Florida Blue’s Web and Mobile Manager and Glenn Kline, Principal at Perficient spoke at IBM Amplify about Florida Blue’s transformation of their customer experience. A dinosaur video clip started the talk and Glenn related how companies are either going to be a digital predator or digital prey. If you are a digital dinosaur, you will likely become extinct or at least relegated to a market lagging position. On the other hand, Digital predators differentiate themselves by offering both excellent customer experiences as well as excellent digital operations.
Digital masters have to continually innovate on both customer experience and digital operations to remain market leading. Florida Blue is a story of continually innovating on their customer’s experience to acquire and retain customers.
Florida Blue is Florida’s largest health insurance provider with 4.3 million members. They engage with Agents and Sales Partners, Prospects (shoppers), Group Members, Administrators and Providers. They started they digital journey in 2006 with a visitor portal. At one point in 2006, they registered members on the website dropped to a very low number because the site was just not relevant and didn’t contain fresh content.
Florida Blue implemented IBM Digital Experience and site usage immediately jumped. In two years, they increased users 10x. In 2011, Florida Blue focused on consumer transparency and cloud. Here customers were able to see actual procedure costs, what their out of pocket expense would be and allowed them to shop for alternatives. With health care reform in 2013 and 2014, usage of the site doubled as new customers wanted to see what they purchased on the health care exchanges. In 2015, they moved to a multi-lingual site to support their large Spanish-speaking population.
The latest version of the member site includes an accessible, multi-cultural experience. The entire site is responsive and is highly personalized through customer preferences. Marketing is driving a multi-year program to expand to other constituents, increase self services, and create more consistent experiences. New mobile apps focus on specific needs for specific customer needs. Florida Blue is also looking to integrate IoT devices, like health and fitness monitors into the experience.
Florida Blue has a multi-channel delivery plan. This includes leveraging the IBM Digital Experience architecture to present the same data across all channels, including desktop, mobile, IVR, external partners, and call centers. The architecture includes targeted capabilities for self service, including live chat and SMS.
Analytics has been part of the plan since the beginning. IBM Tealeaf was implemented early and allows Florida Blue to monitor site problems and provide quick response to customer issues. Web analytics captures user click events and helps Florida Blue monitor trends. During the past three years, they’ve determined that they received 3x traffic during peak periods, which allows them to plan for system resources.
Glenn talked about these best practices they’ve used to stay on top of the market:
- Focus on customer experience – expectations keep rising, customers are always connected, and they can be frustrated easily by a poor experience. To keep pace, Florida Blue uses the following techniques
- Modern user experience refreshes every couple of years
- Multi-lingual support
- Responsive Design
- Personalized and secure experience in member’s time of need
- Florida does an amazing job of listening to their customers. They do in-line surveys and take feedback seriously. They also monitor social media and respond quickly to issues. Finally, Florida Blue has retail centers across Florida where you can actually meet a real person who can provide assistance.
- Use analytics to understand the site and what consumers are doing
- Conduct usability studies with real customers
- Operational Excellence – innovate on a solid technology investment. Here Florida Blue picked IBM Digital Experience as the technology platform for their member site. This platform integrates web content that is truly managed by business people and not by IT. The personalization capabilities of the platform are used to power dynamic portions of the experience. In addition, the IT group uses these processes to improve operational excellence:
- They do monthly releases to get new capabilities into the market quickly
- Release management is automated through a continuous delivery toolset
- They will be upgrading to Digital Experience 8.5 in a couple of months that will further improve operations
- Performance is a critical part of the design and architecture of the platform. Florida Blue considers performance in every decision they make and then continually perform testing and tuning of the platform.
- Empower customers with information and tools through multi-channel delivery
- Efficient digital operations
