Mounika Konidala 

SUMMARY:

A group plan is a health insurance plan that provides coverage to members of a group that tends to be employees of a company or members of an organization. By the time I joined at BCBSKS, the sales team were in the process of understanding the challenges they have been facing with the small group employer plan (who have less than 51 employees in the organization)

 

I led the UX research effort in designing and implementing a comprehensive user study via user interviews (with both remote and in-person sessions)  to understand the user behavior, their journey, and challenges in each phase for Small group administrators.  This project set a huge milestone of UX research across the firm because of the sales impact in the process.

 

THE CHALLENGE

After enrolled in the insurance plan, group administrators complained that they were not aware of all the resources available to them and process for onboarding. We heard from sales representatives that they always complain about the renewal process which results in a lack of sales. The sales team would like to understand the reasons behind the drop in the percentage of renewals and areas of opportunities to improve in the end to end process.

 

PROCESS

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1. DISCOVERY

The first step of the discovery stage of the process was to understand business requirements and goals in the kick-off meeting. During these kick-off meeting with stakeholders, I was hoping to better understand what are the knowledge gaps we have to fill, thought the process of stakeholders behind the request and what kind of data they were expecting, and talking about the timeline.  

 

2. DEFINE & CREATE A RESEARCH PLAN

In this stage, I evaluate the points I understand from the kick-off meeting to pick the research method and prepare a plan to disturb it to stakeholders.

- What do we think we understand about our users? 

- What are the research objectives?

- Why are we doing this research? How do they relate to the product goals?

- What are the questions we want to be answered through this research?

- What are the hypotheses we have for these questions? 

 

Create a research plan - 

I have created a research plan with all the above questions and shared it with stakeholders to give them an idea on what’s going on with the research activities. It also provides the details about the methodology, goals, research format and target persona details. This naturally translated into a focused research plan that guided the rest of my work. That means understanding the desired outcome and selecting the appropriate process. 

 

This helps me to :

Get everyone (different group stakeholders) on the same page

Educate stakeholders on the goals, questions, and process 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

3. RECRUITMENT

To find the right participants for my research session, I always prefer to come up with a screener which I sent out to customers to fill it out. Interviewing everyone wasn’t an option (and not very effective) so potential participants had to meet our criteria:

 

- Manage insurance (Benefit manager, HR roles) in the company

- Authority - able to influence a purchase (decision maker in the company for employees health insurance activities )

- The main point of contact for the employees in the organization to answer all health-related insurance questions.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Finding good participants (I scheduled interviews and manage the entire recruitment process too)

 

4. CONDUCT RESEARCH SESSION

During each conversation, participants told me why they drop off during the renewal process and what kind of challenges they have been facing in the end to end workflow. I dug deeper to understand the problem they were trying to solve so I break down the questions into each stage to understand the opportunities at each stage in the life cycle. To get a better understanding of the entire life cycle and sales reps activities for answering the customer questions, I did the following activities in parallel:

 

- Shadowed sales reps and spoke with them

- Hung out in the customer service break room and asked them questions

- Observed activity on the field trip 

- Spoke with a group administrator and other staff about the questions they get

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Conversation with a customer

 

Journey map:

The journey map really helped me to figure out our opportunities and challenges to make things better for our customers throughout their life cycle. The insurance itself is a sensitive topic and I always try to build something that is easy to explain it. 

 

Journey - along the tip row we consider each step user takes in that stage - including thoughts and actions 

Empathy  - next we look at empathy and consider how each step in the journey might affect the way they feel

Touchpoints - major activities they did to understand the insurance benefits at each stage

Opportunities - lastly we consider the opportunities for our brand or business to alleviate any problem or issues the customer may have or to cater to and enhance their journey

 

And here it it:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I am not showing the complete map, it’s a very big map and it looks like a booklet. I blurred the pic due to confidential information. 

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5. MEASURE

From the research session, I have analyzed all the qualitative data using a thematic analysis. After the sessions I set up a debrief meeting with observers to get a summary of their thoughts, the second step will listen to the recording and make a note of interesting point on the sticky notes, third step is providing a desirable heading in order to describe the content of user thoughts, and then grouped the notes to came up with the findings.

 

I have created a presentation to walk them through the opportunities and challenges customers facing in each stage. This way stakeholders understand the future outcome behind each opportunity. I have provided audio files as evidence of how user feel about our product

 

 

6. IMPLEMENT

I presented my findings to marketing executives to a) verify their assumptions and b) introduce new customer behaviors via administrator personas. Personas are typically used as a target to aim for during product development. Buyer personas, similarly, inform marketing and sales strategy by encapsulating how buyers think and what triggers them to research a product. These archetypes were referenced by the team when we brainstormed new content/features for the website.

 

We made changes in the renewal process and simplify through electronic enrollment. We are currently in the process of working with different stakeholders to make the end to end process simplify and automate a few steps by implementing online workflows. This is one of the most challenging parts of the process, because the decision on coordinating many diverse groups in the organization - in addition to our sales representatives who goes and sells our product, we also need to work in educating them with the new workflow. 

 

We are keeping our eye on the ultimate goals of reducing the amount of time spent and no of steps to enroll or renew in the plan, making our process less terrifying, increasing our sales number and reducing no of calls received by sales reps.

 

I can not share the end to end process, findings, and recommendations due to NDA, but I can share the process in a call.

 

Result: In the first round of brainstorming sessions, stakeholders and sales representatives were really impressed with the first round of paper prototype and they felt it'll help them to increase the no of sales by showcasing all the benefits to our consumers. This automated process will help renewal processes speeder and less manual work for sales representatives.