Stefan Pieren and Basil Bonzi are two Unic experts who have closely examined the customer portals of the 12 leading Swiss health insurers as part of our new Service Design Report 2021. In this conversation, they discuss why health insurance companies need to offer customer-centric digital services.
Much Potential Remains Untapped
What kind of expertise is actually needed when analyzing customer portals of health insurers?
Basil Bonzi: The foundation for this is extensive experience in using human-centered methods to analyze digital solutions. It also helps, of course, if you have already implemented projects for various health insurance companies.
Stefan Pieren: Additionally, you paradoxically need to detach yourself from your own knowledge and be able to put yourself in the shoes of average users. After a few reviews, you start to understand how something works - even if it's not logical. You need to be able to set this knowledge aside.
And? Your findings in brief?
Basil Bonzi: The range was wide. From cleverly designed portals with customer involvement to solutions that probably wouldn't have survived a usability test. In the health insurance industry, there's a lot of untapped potential. I'm thinking about automating processes or transparently informing customers about their insurance coverage.
Stefan Pieren: And development budgets are obviously flowing into app development first - only what's left over makes it to the web version. Who are actually the people using customer portals of health insurance companies?
Basil Bonzi: They are the many people who already use other customer portals like e-banking and expect to be able to handle administrative matters independently with their health insurance as well.
The range was wide. From cleverly designed portals with customer involvement to solutions that probably wouldn't have survived a usability test.
-- Basil Bonzi
UX Architect
The Differentiating Factor for Health Insurance Companies
The service offerings of health insurers in terms of customer portals are quite comparable. They all do more or less the same thing. How can providers still differentiate themselves?
Stefan Pieren: Even if everyone offers the same thing, it's far from being identical. With an intuitive, expectation-conforming, and easy-to-use portal across all functions - whether website or app - without major irritation factors, you've already done everything right for the majority of customers.
Basil Bonzi: Sure, the ability to submit bills, everyone has that by now. But that's not enough. Providing customers with helpful information so they can understand the submitted bill and the subsequent statement is something that only a few insurers currently offer.
Does the quality of digital services from health insurance companies even play a role in choosing an insurer?
Basil Bonzi: We're used to communicating digitally with companies and have high expectations for digital services. I'm convinced that it will play a significant role, especially for future generations, whether they can interact with their insurance company purely digitally.
Stefan Pieren: If premiums are close, digital services can indeed be the deciding factor.
If premiums are close, digital services can indeed be the deciding factor.
-- Stefan Pieren
Senior Account Executive
Health Insurers Were Not Early Drivers of Digitalization
The internet has been around for 30 years. Yet, I've only recently been able to submit bills online to my health insurance. How do you explain this?
Stefan Pieren: Health insurers were not among the early drivers of digital transformation for a long time, but fortunately, that has changed. A well-designed customer portal with all the automated processes and interfaces to internal core systems costs money initially. A lot of money. This investment needs to pay off in such a competitive market as health insurance.
Basil Bonzi: It also has to do with how health insurance companies have grown and that their internal systems are typically not suitable for easily mapping complex processes for customers. Not to mention the performance that these customers desire.
Three factors centrally influence the user experience: the user, the system, and the context of use. What role does the user actually play in the development of customer portals?
Stefan Pieren: (laughs) I hope a central one! I think that today, no one undertakes a major project like a new customer portal without involving the future users.
Basil Bonzi: If users are not involved in the development from the beginning, customer portals are created that are not practical for the user and ultimately lead to higher workloads for customer service. It's immensely important to connect both perspectives: the provider's view of their customers and the customers' view of the health insurer.
An Enormous Range of Needs
How diverse are the needs of users of health insurance customer portals?
Stefan Pieren: Since everyone in Switzerland must have health insurance, the range of potential needs is enormous! There's the occasional user who discovers the benefits of the customer portal. But also digital natives who want to do everything online. Finding the lowest common denominator here is a challenge.
Basil Bonzi: The challenges will be even more diverse in the future than they are today. There are users who want to fill out insurance applications and quotes purely digitally on their smartphones. Today, I still have to print out a paper and scan it again with my health insurance.
Since 2010, there has been the ISO standard 9241-210, which describes the "process for designing usable interactive systems". Can the customer portals you examined stand up to this standard?
Basil Bonzi: Some portals meet this standard. We found that these portals were developed with user involvement. However, some portals clearly reflect the insurance company's internal view of their customers. The ISO standard requires insurers to put on the famous "customer glasses". They need to redefine their view of their customers and overcome boundaries between internal silos and departments.
Stefan, you were already dealing with digital portals as an information architect when the term User Experience, coined by Don Norman, was not yet common. What has changed in this regard over the last two decades?
Stefan Pieren: When I was allowed to help conceptualize an online portal for a major bank almost exactly 20 years ago, we were considered freaks in the project. (laughs) At that time, we generously assumed that only 5 percent of customers could and would use this offer at all.
The development of knowledge and methods within User Experience, the technological leap with smartphones, and of course the digital transformation in society now allow us to design portals for 90 percent of customers. I never thought this would be the case back then. Today, armies of specialists are working to make digital life easier for everyone. You can see this (also) in the evolution of customer portals.
About the Individuals
Stefan Pieren, Senior Account Executive
As a Senior Account Executive, Stefan has been supporting and advising clients in the Finance & Insurance sector since 2012. Previously, he spent twelve years conceptualizing websites, portals, and online shops as an information architect.
Basil Bonzi, UX Architect
Basil has been involved with digitalization in healthcare for several years. Before his time at Unic, he dealt with the complex structures of the Swiss tariff system and the processing of benefit statements using artificial intelligence.