Cost reduction and performance improvement: Customer service

The challenge

Satisfied, loyal customers are critical to achieving sustained revenue growth. As price-based competition and margin pressures increase, payers need to differentiate themselves by giving their customers - members, employers and providers - consistently excellent experiences.

Payers need to establish a culture where every employee, whether working in traditional customer service channels or in field or support functions, is empowered and motivated to exceed customer expectations. Every customer touch point and each customer interaction either disappoints the customer and leads to complaints and defections, or pleases the customer and helps develop deeper, stronger customer relationships. The most capable and personable call center person can't repair a relationship with a customer who experiences frequent errors in processing claims or consistently delayed payments.

How we can help you

You need to formulate a customer service strategy that aligns with your overall business objectives. You need to execute the strategy to deliver a consistently excellent customer experience. We can use our firm's broad health-industry experience and customer and market insights to help define the desired customer experience. We can help you align customer service channels, non-sales workforce and other parts of the business with overall growth objectives to develop a well-conceived customer service strategy. We can show you how to leverage people, processes, and technology to establish a culture, commitment and infrastructure that support your service strategy.

You need to carefully monitor customers' experiences with your organization. Be swift and thorough in remedying customer service deficiencies. We can help you identify and remedy billing and other performance issues that lead to customer dissatisfaction.

Common services include:

• Defining the desired customer experience through customer and market insight
• Aligning enterprise-wide business practices with overall growth objectives to develop a well-conceived customer service strategy
• Leveraging people, processes and technology to establish a culture, commitment and infrastructure that support the service strategy
• Identifying and remedying billing and other performance issues that lead to customer dissatisfaction