DETROIT — A 300-square-foot mobile, interactive room created by Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan to help its employees “walk in the shoes” of health insurance customers received the 2013 CX Innovation Award from the Customer Experience Professionals Association.
The association is an international non-profit organization created to guide and enhance the growing professional field of customer experience management. The CX Innovation Awards recognize new practices that improve customer experience, result in strong business impact, and advance the field of customer experience for other organizations.
“The Michigan Blues are honored to be recognized for our continuous effort to make our customers’ experience easy, useful and enjoyable,” said Kathryn Levine, vice president for corporate marketing and customer experience at Blue Cross Blue Shield. “Health insurance is undergoing a radical transformation into a consumer-driven industry. To succeed, health insurers must be attuned to the expectations of people, make their coverage easy to understand, and solve problems well. We developed our customer experience room to reflect the real hopes and headaches people in Michigan have with their health insurance. We took it on the road, visiting 10 Blues’ locations in 90 days to interact with thousands of our employees.”
The BCBSM Customer Experience Room helps the Blues’ nearly 7,000 employees better understand and empathize with customer pain points about health insurance, and fosters enterprise-wide employee engagement in improving the customer experience. The mobile, interactive room offers an immersive learning environment through a series of exercises designed to meet a variety of learning styles. Using self-guided navigation, employees walk through the experiences of three customer “personas,” crafted after extensive research by the company. Employees see how customer experience initiatives undertaken by the company connect with how Blues customers want their experience to be.
Levine will be one of four panelists during a Detroit Regional Chamber Mackinac Policy Conference presentation on May 30 on customer experience at Grand Hotel on Mackinac Island. The panel presentation will discuss how health insurers are changing to meet the demands of consumers, and why the customer experience matters to companies in all industries.
