Health Plan Rentention Study
Background
Premera Blue Cross is a not-for-profit health insurance company. It provides health benefits to over 2.5 million people nationwide.
This research aimed to understand ‘why’ customers stay or leave their health plan. This research informed marketing strategies on how to better retain customers.
My role
Led research execution and analysis
Method
Usertesting.com
Unmoderated interview
Stakeholders
Sales & Marketing
Why do we care?
Retention opportunities are widely thought to be cheaper than converting new customers, and should be easier, people are biased to stay with the status quo rather than make a change.
Research Approach
Problem
There is a lack of understanding of why customers left us for other health plan options. When we learned about the business problem, we first tried to get more data on how many stay vs. left and what factors might contribute to this problem. Due to time constraints in getting this information, we decided to explore this information from the customers.
Research Goals
Understand customers’ decision-making process during health plan selection.
Understand what causes them to choose the same health plan or choose a different option.
Understand what factors are most important and least important to customers.
Research questions: “How do people evaluate their health plans when in a ‘renewal’ situation?(They have a health plan with their current employer and are signing up for the next year）
Example Interview Questions:
Describe the last time you signed up for a health insurance plan. What was your plan and insurance company's option(s)?
How were the plans similar and different?
What were you looking for in your health insurance plan when you were evaluating plan options?
Did you sign up for the same health plan you had been on previously? Why or why not?
Method
We recruited proxy-customers who were closely aligned with our customers with similar enrollment experiences. We also want to know the ‘why’ behind people’s decisions, so we used unmoderated interviews.
Research Analysis & Findings
We used excel and affinity diagrams to find emerging themes. There are two key findings:
1. People go through a similar decision-making process to evaluate their plan options
Participant detail
22 participants
Had multiple health plan options
Recently had open enrollment experiences with the same employer
“The reason I changed it because the plan wasn’t bad until I had to use it, I had a big deductible, so I really wasn’t able to gain any benefit when I actually need to use it ”
2. How people make choices
People keep their health plan when there’s little plan or life changes
People change health plans when there’s a change, or they reconsider the plan’s value and conclude they aren’t getting the best value
We identified a few segments of customers based on their behaviors.
Recommendations
With the research insights, we were able to provide actionable recommendations to the marketing team on how to better retain customers. In addition, the research also shed light on the importance of understanding customers segment and how we might use that in acquiring new customers.