Lessons for health insurers from Customer Care Week

The recent Customer Care Week provided an opportunity for businesses to reach out to their clients and get feedback on their relationship. For many organisations, this is a fixative on the business calendar with a rote of activities that have to be “done with”.

For a few progressive ones, it was a real chance to gather valuable feedback from partners and customers on how to improve their relationship and hopefully retain the business.

Hospitals by virtue of our peculiar business model characterised mostly by one-time client encounters from walk-in patients are usually struggling with the week. Is it okay to do such activities or will it be seen as aggressive marketing?

As such the conservatives amongst us feel engaging patients or customers don’t apply as much, but there is an opportunity to engage with other business partners.

Across the health ecosystem, some of our businesses participated in the exercise through our suppliers and insurance agents mostly interacting on a business-to-business angle.

From a health entrepreneur doctors’ perspective, our key contacts are the insurance companies we deal with, suppliers and financiers as well as employees. Most health administrators and managers of such entities may have taken time to re-evaluate the relationships and agreements they have and whether these were worthwhile.

With many of our enterprises being in the SME segment, the biggest challenge faced similar to supermarket suppliers is getting claims settled from insurance companies on time.

Similarly, the relationship one has with one’s bankers in line with growth strategy given the prevailing project financing obstacles appears as a common concern. The health industry’s participation in the week was less visible than other market segments.

This low participation creates an opportunity for PR and business strategy consultants to engage us on the importance of the week’s purpose. As part of growth strategy, customer engagement must be a key agenda. How do we optimise service delivery and product visibility as core elements of service appreciation in healthcare?

The top concerns we would expect our partners to engage with us in like claim settlement went ignored judging from the few surveys I took. An example being the nation’s largest insurer with a reported surplus of Sh2 billion.

One would have hoped that with such reserves, it would take time and allocated resources to engage its more than five million customers and key partners towards making the relationship happier and healthier.

Beyond the exercise though, organisations need to evaluate the success of their activities during the week by developing key scoring metrics across customer surveys.

These must be actionable change points for attractiveness to future engagement and continuity of business relationships. Monopolies are not in themselves value prepositions for continued client retention.