Scaling Member Digital Shopping

Humana embarked on an initiative to cater its digital shopping experience to its current customers. Previously, Members needed to use the same digital shopping experience as new-to-Humana shoppers, leading to friction.

Upon a successful pilot–and with the enterprise decision to move more sales to owned digital channels–our goal was to scale this dedicated experience to the entire footprint, becoming available for millions of customers.

Industry: Medicare

Type: Sales - B2C

Project Type: Service definition, Implementation Orchestration

Horizon line: Near-term

Teaming: 1 service designer + 1 researcher. Supported by one Principal Service designer when needed.

Role: Service Design Lead

Key Activities

The cornerstone of the pilot experience was a machine learning model that generates intelligent plan recommendations based on a member’s Medicare details and their ZIP code. As the service designer on the team, I partnered with the Product Manager, and other stakeholders to define a scaled experience that could feasibly be implemented within the PI Planning cycles leading up to the Medicare Annual Enrollment Period (AEP). The most significant evolution to the pilot experience, in addition to the updated recommendation model, was the intent to move to a secure authentication experience, allowing for more personalization features in the digital experience.

Setting the foundation:

  • Identifying key journey pathways

  • Defining key service components and a plan of action

Facilitating secure authentication capabilities:

  • Identifying key authentication pathways

  • Coordinate with designers, architects, product managers, and engineers to ensure authentication matches the intended experience (via maps and wireframes).

Defining the (feasible & near-term) personalized experience:

  • Cross-functional hypothesis workshop to identify opportunities and define personalization concepts based on existing insights and tacit knowledge.

  • Develop and conduct qualitative research to evaluate concepts in partnership with the researcher.

  • Concept refinement, prioritization (based on desirability and effort), and right-sizing

Defining a measurement strategy:

  • Collaborate with data science and business intelligence partners to co-develop a measurement strategy to measure the service end-to-end, across channels, and track digital OKRs and KPIs that the Digital Sales team is responsible for.

  • Develop and coach partners on a multi-altitude conceptual measurement framework grounded in the member journey.

Outcomes

Facilitated the development of a fully-authenticated simple MFA login capabilities for members on the digital shopping experience–a first for Humana.

Designed a personalized digital experience that leverages member data, pre-filling doctor and drug preferences, and pre-filling enrollment forms that is feasible to build within the annual development cycle.

Identified opportunities for longer-term evolution of the service, and opportunities for omnichannel shopping.

Developed a measurement strategy and framework that served as the foundation for measuring service KPIs that ladder up to organizational KPIs. The measurement framework has become foundational for the data science teams’ measurement of digital shopping.

Results

  • Multiple authentication pathways resulted in a 7.2% conversion rate for Members

  • Auto-fill led to a 7% increase in enrollment submission

  • Member Plan recommendation engine scaled to all Internal Agents

Work Snapshots

Member Moments:
One of the first steps was to create a current state journey map of the plan shopping experience based on existing blueprints from the pilot, using “moment architecture” as an organizing framework

Key Service Components:
Introduced the notion of service components to identify key building blocks that needed to be prioritized to implement and deliver the scaled service. Each component became a trackable body of work that was then used to manage the orchestration of the experience.

Authentication:
A cross-functional team of stakeholders from Product, Customer Identity Access and Management, and Software Architecture was brought together to define the fully authenticated login experience. Multiple pathways were identified, accounting for various entry and exit scenarios. This map served as a tool for driving clarity for further definition and implementation work.

Service Definition:
Defining a fully authenticated, personalized experience produced two main features: pre-filling doctors and drugs, and the enrollment form. A series of cross-functional workshops were facilitated to identify opportunities from the current member experience, and design and prioritize solutions. Upon concept evaluation with Medicare shoppers, concepts were refined and prioritized for what would be feasible to implement.

Blueprinting:
Service Blueprints were used to detail the plan shopping experience and backstage–mapping key systems and platforms, API calls, and processes needed to operationalize the experience. The blueprints were developed in close partnership with solutions architects and engineers.

Measurement Strategy:
The measurement framework developed for the work has been used to identify how channel KPIs ladder across altitudes to organizational OKRs all while being grounded in the members’ experience across the service and digital touchpoints.

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