How Digital Onboarding Boosts Member Engagement for Health Insurers

By: Neal Keene,  Field CTO at Smart Communications

With customer expectations growing at a rapid pace, organizations across all industries are moving toward customer-driven, digital-first experiences. This year in particular has forced health insurers to reevaluate their current enrollment and onboarding processes in an effort to improve member engagement. Did you know the most critical time to establish a relationship with your members is within the first 90 days? This is the period of time when health insurers have the opportunity to ensure new members understand their plans, find them easy to navigate, and are satisfied with their level of coverage.

Think about it from a member’s perspective – signing up for a new healthcare plan often occurs at the start of new employment. During this time, the volume of forms and paperwork required is high and the process can be time-consuming, and insurance enrollment is only one set of forms among many.  Sadly, too many business processes still require customers to complete and sign paper forms and either scan and fax or even worse, mail them back. No one enjoys this tedious and time-consuming effort, either externally or internally.

The cumbersome process of filling out a form isn’t a good first impression. One way to boost member engagement is through smart, guided, interactive interviews that make onboarding frictionless.

Here are five ways a smarter onboarding process can help differentiate your member journey and keep members engaged from day one.

Replace Paper Forms with Guided, Adaptive Interviews

It’s time to re-imagine the form as your onboarding mechanism. Instead of serving up static paper forms or online PDFs shift toward delivering adaptive interviews through an interactive and mobile-friendly process. This allows you to tailor questions and responses to each individual and guides them through the process efficiently keeps them more engaged throughout the entire process.

Personalize the Experience by Reusing Information

It’s likely you have already collected plenty of information from your new member or employee. Asking members to enter or re-enter information you should already know, or posing irrelevant questions creates a frustrating, time-consuming onboarding experience. A new employee’s name, address and other data should available in a company’s HR system to establish payroll and other administrative requirements. Make the process easier and speed up onboarding by prepopulating information from your core systems and then have employees simply verify it.

Ensure Your Onboarding Process is Consistent and “Device Agnostic”

Members today have multiple devices, but they still expect consistent experiences—and the onboarding process is no exception. Whether interacting with your company via phone, desktop, or mobile app the experience should be equally rewarding and, better yet, seamless. This means that information collected via one interaction should be used to inform subsequent interactions. And, ideally, a process could start a process on one device and finish on another—picking up right where they left off.

Integrate Digital Signatures to Save Time

If you still require members to print and sign an onboarding document to move forward, you’re creating bottlenecks that put the onboarding process and overall member experience at risk. By starting with interview-style conversations and finishing with simple e-signature solutions, like DocuSign, forms are completed in a timelier manner.

Improve Operational Efficiency

Digitizing the onboarding process matters to your staff as well. Traditional forms can lead to data integrity issues as they open the door to errors due to ineligible handwriting or typos. Inaccurate data can cause operational inefficiencies, especially if your back-office staff is still relying on manual processing of form data.  A digital, interactive onboarding process reduces the need for manual work, ensures data is captured accurately, and ultimately enhances member and employee satisfaction.

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Looking for more ways to create meaningful connections with your members across every touchpoint? Download our whitepaper, From Onboarding to Lifelong Relationships and get inspired!