The Chief Marketing Officer’s role in transforming healthcare consumer experience

To flourish in an industry flooded with new, digital-first market entrants, healthcare organizations must place consumer experience at the center of everything they do. Today’s consumers expect health plans and health systems to deliver the same kind of convenience as companies in the retail and banking sectors, and there are myriad clinical and operational benefits to creating a consumer-first experience. Organizations that invest in comprehensive, integrated experience transformation can gain lifelong customers and grow business profitability amid disruption.

During a virtual roundtable sponsored by League and hosted by Modern Healthcare in March 2022, Mike Butler, past president of Renton, Wash.-based Providence health system, led a conversation about CX transformation with four marketing executives representing a mix of health systems and payers. The experts discussed prioritizing CX as a business imperative, making cultural changes for experience improvement, measuring experience across the care continuum, and overcoming challenges associated with disparate point solutions.

Mike Butler
Past President
Providence

Nick Ragone
Executive Vice President and Chief Marketing and Communications Officer
Ascension

Kristy LoRusso
Senior Vice President and National Chief Marketing Officer
Kaiser Permanente

Mack McGee
Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer
CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield

Jennifer Bazante
Chief Marketing Officer
Humana

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Nick Ragone: Four or five years ago, large provider systems such as Ascension would think of experience as a great clinical outcome. If there was a great clinical outcome, we’d assume there was a great experience – the patient is happy, they're going to go online and say nice things in reviews, and they're going to come back. Our own research has shown that's not always the case. People don't conflate a great quality outcome with a great experience. In fact, they’re beginning to think of them as quite different things, and they almost now head into it stipulating, ‘I'm probably going to have a really good outcome here, but...’ And it’s the ‘but’ that really matters. Patients want to have a great experience from beginning to end. There are probably 20 touch points that form a great experience. We need to understand each touch point and weight them appropriately – which ones are dissatisfiers, which ones are pleasers, which ones are neutral – then try to deliver a great experience consistently across those experiences.

Jennifer Bazante: It’s important to create an experience based on our customers’ terms. We have to ask: What is the customer’s starting place? How are they navigating our business today? What are they doing to navigate the ecosystem? It’s thinking about the journey and in our case, whether the consumer is shopping for or currently using a health plan. It’s important to behave like a consumer-facing brand, which is what we have evolved to from what we previously thought of as traditional health insurance. One thing we are trying to do across all our healthcare companies, and in many industries, is to create simplicity. Consumers don't have time today for friction. They have too many choices to make, and they're going to be loyal to the brands that create simple, satisfying experiences.

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Kristy LoRusso: As both a payer and provider, we're thinking about this end-to-end. Our role is to get the core capabilities right each and every day – to pull the administrative friction out of the system and identify the key care experiences and caring moments that we can deliver with consistency every time. Using the data, listening, and bringing that forward in the organization is one of the roles of a CMO. Making sure there is a really clear brand promise that everyone can understand and own is another part of the role, because delivering experience is much more than a marketing accountability . In my role, I define the brand and help people understand the brand, yet I need to help empower everyone working at Kaiser Permanente to live the brand every day from where they sit.

Mack McGee: We know today that many struggle or don't understand what they are consuming from health insurers. They do not understand the products they buy, the benefits they have, or ultimately, what their coverage affords them. The reality is we have a comprehension issue and a consumption issue, and we are all desperately trying to reimagine plan and benefit product design to try and make that easier. In the interim, the CMO role is about how you lean in and appeal to our audiences while acknowledging this dynamic and not making members feel as if they are the outliers when they need to engage.

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MM: Many organizations have leaned on classic scoring systems like Net Promoter Score for a long time. The reality is that NPS isn't our best experience-measurement program. With the time and effort it takes to collect data for NPS, we can't act fast enough in that model. You have to broaden what you're measuring and the depth of those measurements. At CareFirst, we've invested in a new CX measurement program that looks at “moments of truth” and marries that with our brand promise and platform, which talks about being simple, clear and human. So, that experience measurement program is looking at these moments of truth and asking: Were we simple? Were we clear? Did we provide a human interaction in that moment? We need more direct feedback if we are to improve these moments of truth. We all know that NPS scoring in general, even with best in class in our industry, is still very low relative to NPS in most major industries. We have to go deeper and get more prescriptive about how to take action.

JB: Our No. 1 priority is customer satisfaction and retention. If we create a great brand promise, and we keep that promise through delightful experiences, we will keep customers more loyal, more satisfied, and they'll stay with us longer. But we have to figure out what are those leading indicators and metrics along the way that create that cumulative experience for the consumer? We still do use transactional and relational NPS; I think they're good metrics. We can look at the driver analysis of those things, but it is a blunt instrument, and it’s not going to give us very specific reactions to the moments that matter, the moments of truth along the customer journey. And that's what really matters at the end of the day – that's where you're going to lose or win and retain your customers.

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KL: We are all mission-based organizations committed to diversity, equity and inclusion, and it relates to this notion of simplicity we’re talking about. Health literacy is really important. So, one of the things that I'm proud Kaiser Permanente did several years ago – before we were even in this experience management conversation – was put clear and simple rules and guidelines in place that can be applied to all our communications. These guidelines really help us be accountable for ensuring what we are saying is in words that everyone understands.

In organizations our size, with all the different kinds of individuals that we care for every day, it's critical that everyone sees the same North Star Vision in the same way. For instance, what do we mean when we use words like ‘experience management,’ ‘real-time feedback’ or ‘journey’? As marketers, we talk journey language all day long, but my chief financial officer, for example, does not, and I need to make sure he understands what these words mean in a context that he can understand. That’s something we've been paying close attention to, in order to rally the organization. I love this idea of continuous learning and letting the agile teams go. One thing we're discussing right now, with a thousand flowers blooming, is which ones to pick and which ones to let go.

MB: This next question is one I have a lot of interest in, and it has to do with making decisions around technology underlying consumer experience. I work with a next-generation pharmacy benefit management company that spent a ton of time – three years – building the technology before going to market. The CMO has been intimately involved with the technology, how it works and how the caregiver or employee of the company utilizes it. Their Net Promoter Score runs between 90 and 100, on about 250,000 members. She actually has a team that uses machine learning on the data to identify the exact impact to each individual employee as it relates to pharmacy spend, and what are things to tweak to make it more affordable. I found it interesting to hear the Chief Marketing Officer have this scale of accountability when it came to technology.

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NR: Part of a great experience is intuitive technology. More and more of the entry points of our sites of care, particularly during COVID-19, are either virtual or contactless through some form of technology. The provider industry hasn't had the greatest track record on having easy-to-use digital technologies. Whether it's contactless care, telemedicine, or monitoring your own conditions, it needs to be simple, like everything else we do. People are looking at experiences in other parts of their life – Uber Eats, Amazon – and just how intuitive they are. While we might not get there overnight, certainly there's an expectation. They're juxtaposing those experiences with healthcare and saying, ‘We want that ease of use’ in product design, app design, web enablement, online scheduling and online bill pay.

JB: We've been talking a lot about digital products that consumers interact with, but also part of the experience is the marketing technology we use to interact with consumers. How are they consuming our messages in the omnichannel marketplace, both online and offline? What resonates with them? This creates the data we need to make decisions. One of the challenges we face is that a lot of education has to happen internally because while many parts of the organization understand claims data and financial data, it can be challenging to understand the data that's needed for marketing and how marketing is both a consumer and a creator of data. You need technology for that.

When vetting these platforms, we need to think about democratization. If I'm building a customer journey on a platform, how can I use that journey, or the core aspects of it, someplace else? You need to have a combination of people who understand the role marketing technology plays in solving business problems and can apply it successfully. There's this purple unicorn in talent that we're trying to find who are able to create great experiences using marketing technology and data. It's a big challenge; lots of companies are searching for these types of individuals, and not just in healthcare.

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KL: One thing I’ve been relentless about in talking with others is taking experience out of a functional accountability. Experience is all our jobs. Everyone has a role in that.

MM: Something I really impressed upon the experience team last year is your job is not to redesign all of the experiences, your job is to promote a culture that thinks about experience in all the things they do. And when you discern that difference, it takes some pressure off the experience team. Depending on where organizations are in their journey, your job is to start to promote that idea of culture, that connectivity to the brand, so that as folks do things at scale, they start to bring that practice in. Creating awareness that we don't always make it easy to do business with us is paramount to getting the organization at large to buy into CX transformation and help identify what areas we can touch and impact.

NR: There is always the need to merchandise the importance of the work that we're doing – for us to say experience does weigh heavily on whether or not somebody is going to come back. If it's a branded, good experience, that's a huge differentiator in your market, and it's really important to invest in that. That could be a game changer, especially as we get into this hybrid competitive landscape. There are a lot of unknowns coming out of COVID-19. There are a lot of new nontraditional entrants into healthcare, so experience could be the difference-maker going forward. Whereas five or 10 years ago, marketing was just a little bit of qualitative awareness – some billboards, TV, radio, and everybody was happy – that era's gone, and it's not coming back. Now, it's about moments that delight, branded experience, great qualitative and quantitative marketing, and all of that working together. It's up to us, as Chief Marketing Officers and leaders in our disciplines, to show that there is a causal relationship between great brands, great marketing, great experience, and great growth – and to prove it.

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Founded in 2014, League is a platform technology company powering next-generation healthcare consumer experiences. Payers, providers, consumer health partners and employers build on League’s platform to deliver high-engagement, personalized healthcare experiences consumers love. Millions of people use solutions powered by League to access, navigate and pay for care.