EXCELLUS BCBS
One health plan's digital content checkup
CUSTOMER JOURNEY MAPPING | CONTENT STRATEGY | CONTENT PLANNING
Background
As upstate New York’s largest non-profit health plan, Excellus Blue Cross Blue Shield insures more than 1.5 million individuals through thousands of employer benefits programs. Despite its strong position in the market and a heritage dating back more than 80 years, the company was quick to recognize that more digitally savvy competitors — not to mention digital disruptors like Oscar — could challenge its position as one of the area’s leading insurers. They were determined not to fall behind. In fact, they were eager to determine how they could leap ahead.
Recognizing that customer experience could provide them with a distinct competitive advantage, and that content is the cornerstone of the best B2B buyer experiences, Excellus BCBS engaged VERDINO to help their team determine how they could best educate and engage employers, providers, and members at every stage of their customer journey.
The Work
Our work began with a deep dive into each of Excellus BCBS’s three key audiences and the myriad ways they engaged with the health plan over the course of the customer lifecycle.
This allowed us to map out three distinct but interrelated customer journeys around which we would structure an interactive workshop designed to optimize Excellus’s content experience around the asks and actions that happen at each stage of each journey.
The workshop at the heart of our engagement brought together a cross-functional team of senior leaders. And we put them to work. Over the course of a busy full-day experience, we detailed the company’s current content assets and initiatives, and identified every place these fell short of audience needs and expectations.
With a baseline established, we then worked together to redefine the company’s content experience step-by-step, stage-by-stage, resulting in a totally reimagined ‘content journey map’ aligned to each stage of the customer journey — for all three key audiences.
We closed the workshop by prioritizing, sequencing, and assigning accountability for the new content tactics the team had identified during the day. And of course we hosted a cocktail hour to reward the team for a job well done.
Outcomes
Our facilitated process resulted in better audience understanding, a renewed approach to mapping content to key customer information needs across the customer journey, and a commitment to implementing new content initiatives that would help Excellus BCBS deliver a digital experience that is every bit as good (better, even!) than anything their competition can offer.
Working alongside our clients, we:
- Discovered and documented customer journey maps for the company's three key segments, providing new insight into audience information needs at each stage.
- Established a high level content strategy and actionable plan optimized around best-in-class content-driven experiences for employers, providers and members.
- Identified a wide range of opportunities to better serve each audience by providing the right content, at the right stage, in the right formats and through the right channels.
- Aligned a team of cross-functional leaders around an executable plan, resulting in a time-based, prioritized roadmap with accountability for implementing newly identified content initiatives.
