Survey

A recent study from Accenture confirms what most of you who have contacted medical insurers over the past few years already know -- their customer service still stinks.

Oh sure they’ve spent a lot of money on customer service technology, but once again proving the adage that customer service is not technology, it’s the people using it, the survey found that over the past five years, insurers have not much improved their customer service.

The study, "The 7 Things Your Health Insurance Customers Are Not Telling You," found that 11 percent of respondents “strongly agreed” that the increased use of technology in customer service has significantly improved the level of service in the past five years, according to industry observer Nicole Lewis.

TMC (News - Alert) also had the news that nearly 50 percent of health customers are willing to pay more for quality customer service -- a factor U.S. health insurers need to address to effectively compete for new clients -- according to other Accenture (News - Alert) findings.

Basically, Lewis says, the study shows that “health insurers seem to have failed to provide the personalized experience customers crave, even though they've made huge investments in technology to meet that goal.”

It’s not just that so few people agree that customer service is good, what’s striking is how many agree with the opposite -- “10 percent of respondents strongly agreed their health insurers ‘tailor my customer experience to match my needs, preferences, and/or value to them,’ while more than twice that amount, 22 percent, strongly disagreed... only 9 percent agreed that their health insurers' ‘communications make me feel a connection to them,’ while 32 percent strongly disagreed.”

The Accenture report has some suggestions for improving customer service. As Lewis says, they include making sure the voice of the customer is heard and influences how the self-service experience is designed, developing social media strategies that focus on customer concerns and using customer-facing channels such as the Web, interactive voice response (IVR), mobile, contact centers, and social media to analyze, interpret, and act on data.