Forrester

Health insurance organizations expect generative AI (genAI) to transform healthcare. They’re experimenting to unearth its potential to both automate back-office tasks and to tackle complex processes to elevate the employee and member experience. But both health insurers (HIs) and healthcare provider organizations are starting this journey with poorly performing, outdated IT systems, which Black Book estimates costs the industry $8 billion annually. GenAI-powered transformation can only happen if HIs invest in sturdy, agile technical infrastructure. Just as importantly, they also must develop internal capabilities and readiness for strategy and change management to gain genAI’s true potential in their workflows. My new report, Generative AI: What It Means For Health Insurers, dives into genAI’s impact on HIs and examines avenues for early adoption and ways to circumvent potential risks. Some early benefits of genAI applications for HIs are: Expediting care coordination through digitizing the intake process. Automating clinical reviews for prior authorization and care management rapidly increases care coordination and prevents delays in care. Gaining contextual insights from customer interactions. By analyzing customer interaction data during typical activities (e.g., searching benefits) and high-value moments (e.g., renewal), HIs can better comprehend how members perceive their products, services, and overall experience. Enabling knowledge management via conversational experience. Employee productivity tools powered by large language models (LLMs) in contact centers and internal chatbots help customer service agents resolve customer issues efficiently. Enhancing the member experience. HIs can use healthcare-specific LLMs to automate and improve experiences across the member lifecycle. How Can Healthcare Leaders Stay Up To Date On Generative AI? GenAI applications are evolving rapidly, and keeping a pulse on who, when, where, why, and how is challenging. HIs should align on values, principles, and goals at an enterprise level — not a functional level. Senior leaders must decide whether they want to reimagine every function within their organization or pursue a more measured approach, such as augmenting their staff’s abilities or consumer experiences in small pilots. How Can Healthcare Organizations Get Involved In Upcoming Forrester GenAI Research? My research on generative AI in healthcare will continue as healthcare organizations navigate core genAI issues, new security implications, and the impact on and opportunities for employees. Also, see Forrester’s dedicated genAI theme page for more insights and guidance. If you would like to participate in our research, please contact me ([email protected]) to schedule a research interview. And if you’re a Forrester client, let’s talk via a guidance session or inquiry to explore how HIs are tapping into genAI. source

Traditionally, HR or employee experience (EX) leaders cared about employer value propositions (EVPs) and CMOs cared about employer brand. But EVP and employer brand are tightly linked, as their definitions suggest: Employer brand is the sum of what people outside your organization think about it as a place to work. EVP is the sum of what people inside your organization think about it as a place to work, based on the unique benefits and opportunities your organization offers against the cost and effort required to succeed there. Who influences external and internal perceptions of the organization? The employees! So, even when HR leaders and CMOs are highly collaborative, if employees don’t have a defined role in the equation, they can experience a different reality than the one HR and Marketing are trying to build. In short, employer brand and EVP is everyone’s job. In our new report, What Your Company Means To Your Workforce Matters For Your Talent Strategy’s Success, we see three behaviors emerge in organizations that have synchronized everyone’s role in employer brand and EVP: Align the two through research insights. Utilize employee listening efforts, social media monitoring, and competitive analysis — and align on the resulting insights — for evolving the EVP and employer branding. Identify and address dissonance between EVP and lived experience. Through the research effort, identify where there is dissonance between what your employer brand says and what your employees experience. Lead with employee voices. Integrate employee perspectives into employer branding efforts to enhance the authenticity and appeal of the employer brand, so it resonates with both current and prospective talent. Whether you’re an HR/EX leader, CMO, or hiring manager who wants to recruit in-demand talent, it’s important to understand the dynamics between EVP and employer brand. Reach out if you’d like to schedule a guidance session on these topics, or their connection to relevant topics ranging from culture to digital talent recruitment.           source

Nearly all customer experience (CX) measurement and voice-of-the-customer (VoC) efforts use customer surveys. But your surveys are costlier than you think. Obvious costs include the budget for a tech vendor you use to send and analyze surveys or incentives for customers. Hidden costs are more problematic because we don’t consider them enough. They arise when surveys: Squander customers’ attention, time, and goodwill. Deplete stakeholders’ time and ability to make customer-focused good decisions. Waste your own time on reporting data that people don’t act on. In this blog, I’ll focus on the first issue. If you prefer to listen rather than read, check out our CX Cast Episode, “Feedback Is A Touchpoint, Too.” Surveys Squander Customers’ Attention, Time, And Goodwill Consider these three major problems with surveys as they are today: Surveys Consume Customer Attention Your business can only survive if customers read, consider, and respond to your marketing emails, offers, campaigns, information, etc. You also need customers to take part in research so you can understand their future needs. Using some of that limited attention on a survey is absolutely worth it if the survey is good and brings you valuable data. But are most surveys? No. Growing efforts to collect zero-party data to feed firms’ personalization efforts and the wider martech stack will make this even worse: More firms will reach out to customers, asking them about their preferences and wishes. Surveys Undermine Customer Relationships You risk seeming like you don’t know customers and don’t care about them. My bank asked me in a CX survey which credit card I own and how often I use it. The credit card provider knows both of those things — maybe the CX team cannot connect the data, but asking me these questions undermines my trust in my bank. Surveys Add A Negative Touchpoint To Customer Journeys In addition to the problem of making customers feel unseen, firms optimize surveys for easy analysis and for which questions various departments want to ask. As a result, they usually are a longish interrogation that doesn’t flow well and includes selfish questions or questions that customers don’t care about. And in many current surveys, the design still resembles a web form from the 2000s. If you have read your Kahneman (and I know many of you have), you will also realize that the survey touchpoint comes toward the end of the broader customer experience that the survey is about. So a bad survey is doubly problematic because the peak end rule tells us the end of an experience matters a lot to how customers remember the experience. If they like the branch visit but hated the survey, that will worsen memories of the overall experience! We need to follow six principles, all under the motto of “design feedback collection as a touchpoint,” if we want to strengthen relationships, be able to capture customer attention, and create good experiences rather than bad ones. 1. Rethink Surveys As Conversations Surveys should be designed to mimic natural, engaging conversations rather than interrogations. This approach involves creating a flow where questions are logically ordered and relevant to the customer’s experience. If you have conversational design experts at your company, get their recommendations on how to make the survey feel more like an engaging dialogue. If you do nothing else, read the survey aloud to someone who matters to you (your boss, wife, first date). This simple exercise can reveal issues with wording and flow that may not be apparent on paper. If the survey is embarrassing or feels tedious to you, it’s likely your customers will feel the same. Don’t expose your customers to it. 2. Don’t Just Say You Value Customers’ Feedback — Prove It If customers gift you their time to give feedback, you are now responsible! You must make sure to give back. Customers want to know their input is valued and acted upon. Share examples of tangible changes made based on previous feedback. You can do that in one-to-many conversations or even in your next survey invite, as you see in this example. This not only encourages participation but also enhances the customer experience by reinforcing their importance in shaping the brand’s direction. As discussed, organizations often have internal pressures to include numerous questions in a survey, which can overwhelm customers. Highlight the opportunity cost of using customers’ time for unnecessary questions to streamline surveys and respect customers’ input and time. 3. Pre-Test To Avoid Confusion And Ambiguity Pre-test the survey with real customers or employees outside the project team. Many organizations think of A/B tests, and while those are important, you need to do more. You also cannot just ask respondents if they understand the questions. Instead, ask them to restate the questions in their own words. This practice helps uncover potential misunderstandings and ensures clarity. For example, when asking a question like, “Was our communication good?” respondents restating it tells you if they interpret this as the effectiveness of language, the overall communication process, or something else. Only if you identify these variances early on can you avoid confusion and gather more accurate and useful data. 4. Match Survey Content And Timing I was recently invited to a radio interview on surveys by Marketplace, a US public radio broadcast covering business and the economy. The host Dan told the story of how he bought tomato seeds at Home Depot and got a survey about the purchase before he was even able to sow them, much less eat the fruits of his labor. Check out Dan’s interview with Fred Reichheld, two other experts, and me. You can still send a survey right away, but limit yourself to things the customer can judge — like how easy it was to buy the tomatoes. And focus on things you want to change in that moment. In addition, collect feedback after the customer achieves the goal of their journey. Only then will you get customers to reflect. These insights form the customers’ “remembering self” which influences

Commvault announced that it is acquiring Clumio for $47 million on September 24. On its surface, the acquisition doesn’t bring a significant number of customers, and it doesn’t expand Commvault’s overall data protection coverage significantly. So what does this acquisition mean to one of the leaders in the enterprise data resilience market? Commvault And Clumio Users: What It Means To You Commvault can abstract data protection across multiple cloud environments, and it relies on traditional architecture that uses compute and data movers. Clumio dedicated itself to the protection of AWS services. Its architecture takes advantage of native cloud infrastructure like AWS serverless Lambda functions for ephemeral compute needs. The acquisition gives Commvault additional depth and expertise on AWS and should be viewed alongside its relatively recent purchase of Appranix, a cloud resilience and recovery company. Commvault customers leverage Clumio’s efficient, cloud-native data protection with Appranix’s runbook capabilities to build a high-performance cloud resilience platform that handles fast rebuild of application and infrastructure and then automatically attaches it to protected data in a way that scales to meet almost any resilience RTO (recovery time objective). For enterprise clients, this acquisition should improve their overall resilience. Is This New? Commvault is not the first company to pursue the strategy of building deep data protection and recovery capacity in the public cloud. It is emulating a playbook from Druva in terms of exploiting the functionality of AWS to accelerate cloud resilience, though Druva’s capabilities are less pronounced in recovery runbook management. In the greater data resilience market, almost all long-standing players are expanding their capabilities for backing up and restoring hyperscaler offerings but not just cloud VMs — storage, database, Kubernetes, and other services are part of this, as well. Single hyperscaler-focused companies like Clumio have found it harder to compete as traditional players add more cloud capabilities. We expect that every enterprise backup player will make similar moves to address enterprise needs, especially as hybrid cloud adoption continues to expand. Expect Increasing Cloud Usage And Little Repatriation We can learn a lot about the enterprise tech stack by observing the actions and the portfolio of the backup companies that support them. Many vendors claim a resurgence of repatriation, but the actions of both the hyperscalers and the data protection companies like Commvault tell us that enterprises are learning to use cloud environments more effectively and that they are moving beyond cloud VMs, like EC2, into serverless and container-based compute. Additionally, these businesses are separating application infrastructure from data to allow for new resilience patterns such as those enumerated in the report, How To Design Your Cloud-Native Patterns For Resilience. And although many companies have repatriated an app or two, the general trend is increased cloud usage both in terms of percentage of your infrastructure and in sophistication of its usage. source