Among Germany’s most enduring health insurance companies, our client was the first to embrace the opportunities offered by technological development when they launched their first shoot-and-scan-your-invoice app in 2011. Despite operating in a notoriously conservative industry, HanseMerkur moved quickly as we approached them with a pitch focusing on leveraging digital technology to engage customers more and in a more positive setting. The result? A zero to a hundred proof of concept of an innovative customer engagement solution, built on artificial intelligence, AI, and machine learning and with an imminent user experience, positively tested with their customer base in just three months.
The Challenge: Creating Loyalty and Differentiation in a Conservative and Underappreciated Industry
While many industries have enjoyed the digital transformation opportunities during the past decades, the health insurance industry is still characterised by conservatism. Customers tend to engage with their health insurance provider when they need coverage only, and usually during challenging periods of physical or mental disorders. Simultaneously, health insurance companies are under the same cost, optimisation, and customer loyalty pressure as other industries and the lack of positive interaction with the customers make it difficult to differentiate on other parameters than price and coverage satisfaction. Changes in customer behaviour means the customers have turned to Google for health related questions, robbing the insurance company an excellent opportunity to engage positively with their customers by offering relevant services of their emerging health services portfolio when there is a need. Helping customers to better recover or even prevent them from becoming sick is not only a better business case, but also leads to a much better relationship than just covering damages. Albeit one of the oldest and most traditional private health insurance companies and operating in a reserved industry, HanseMerkur was at the forefront of technological development when they launched an app to scan and submit invoices for reimbursement as early as in 2011. It was therefore not surprising that they were immediately interested when we in 2019 started discussing how we could help them innovate further in their industry.
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The Solution
While the health insurance industry has been rather stagnant in the past decades’ development, the opposite is true about their customers’ expectations and behaviours as well as the digital opportunities built by technology. These opportunities include cross-vertical partnerships which the customers are hardly aware of, and e-services which both help reduce the costs of call centres, improve customer satisfaction, and create an inflow of data the insurance company could leverage to optimise and personalise their products & service offerings. Following our initial pitch, HanseMerkur was inspired to research the opportunities in depth, leading to a concept which was built around their IT department and infrastructure, their customer service center and health service portfolio, their key IT providers as well as best-fitted 3rd party solutions. The result: a highly positively reviewed concept embracing innovative technologies such as artificial intelligence and machine learning. As HanseMerkur understood the importance of a great user experience, this was prioritised from the beginning, leading to a hyper modern and sleek user interface as entry point for the company’s new, positive customer engagement.
- Co-created a disruptive and successfully tested tangible service concept along customer and business needs within less than 3 months
- Proposed solution is now fully integrated with existing IT infrastructure and customer service processes with a ready-to-go implementation plan for MVP and a clear roadmap
- Top customer survey scores in company's history: 8/10 of 1000 validation customers rated the concept positively
- Survey results support desired change in perception from \"insurance only\" to \"healthcare provider\"
About HanseMerkur
HanseMerkur is the second-oldest and one of the fastest growing private health insurers in Germany with 1.5 million customers. Including other business fields, their customer base increased by around 400,000 to 10.8 million policyholders, doubling in the last ten years. According to their most recent report, the group had employed 2,177 office and field staff as well as full-time agents.
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