Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan's 2020 AWARD FINALIST CASE STUDY : Best Achievement in Operational Excellence to deliver an outstanding Customer Experience Excellence.

Read this article about Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan , one of our finalists, in the category Best Achievement in Operational Excellence to deliver an outstanding Customer Experience Excellence, selected by the independent judging panel, for the 2020 Business Transformation & Operational Excellence Industry Awards program.

BCBSM's Customer Experience Journey

BCBSM competes in a challenging, complex and uncertain industry landscape including:

• Unsustainable cost trends, complex plans and shifting of the cost burden to employees and consumers,
• Dynamic competitive environment and industry uncertainty due to government and regulatory concerns, and
• Ever increasing consumer expectations in an industry that historically underperforms other categories.

These challenges made business difficult for BCBSM.  Research from Forrester put customer experience for health insurance plans on par with cable providers.  Changing the trajectory of member experience would be critical to sustaining BCBSM’s strong market position.  Senior leaders set a strategic objective to leapfrog competitors by building and leveraging a robust Customer Experience Capability.  BCBSM embarked on a journey to transform the entire enterprise from B2B to B2Me to better address customer needs.

Beginning in 2012, BCBSM began making intentional investments in an enterprise-wide Customer Experience discipline, adhered to its strategy.  To be successful, every employee would need to understand the criticality of members and perform their jobs with a “customer-first” mindset. Enterprise-wide engagement was built into the CX strategy and the corporate culture, including annual employee alignment surveys, annual CX goals, new employee training and significant corporate communications emphasis, including monthly CEO video broadcasts.

BCBSM’s journey began by constructing a foundational understanding of our customers and their experience, built around defining our customers, leveraging research, member segmentation and understanding pain points.  With the foundation set, BCBSM began delivering the three planks in its CX strategy.

• Find & Fix — building capabilities to prevent and solve member abrasions with enterprise-wide impact.
• Transform — building customer-focused employees to engage and activate employees on a sustained basis, while simultaneously constructing robust CX infrastructure to inform our work and measure our progress internally and externally.
• Build — creating experiences to meet or exceed the expectations of our members, leveraging CX capabilities with a new Human-Centered Design model.

BCBSM now has a mature CX Capability that has transformed our entire organization and can be seen in internal and external measures. Enterprise-wide impact is apparent through CEO prioritization and support, ongoing employee engagement in CX practices, and continued investment in new capabilities.

BCBSM’s CX capability is recognized for driving impact both internally and externally.  Employee engagement surveys show a 30+ point increase in customer orientation.  BCBSM was awarded the prestigious J.D. Power and Associates recognition for “highest member satisfaction among commercial health plans in Michigan,” and has received more than a dozen industry awards across its digital platform.  Moreover, customer experience success is translating to market performance with a 2-point increase in NPS since 2017, and 16% growth in contracts from 2010-2018.

The commitment of the organization and the engagement of BCBSM employees has created a competitive advantage that separates BCBSM from the pack (and the cable companies) and ensures that its members choose and use health plans that best meet their individual needs – the ultimate expression of B2Me.