Experian Health

Business Opportunity

Experian Health is always trying to develop and refine products that address the challenges of healthcare providers. With the industry changing at an incredibly rapid pace, new government mandates and regulations, and ever-evolving patient expectations, Experian Health customers are under a lot of pressure to deliver.

To support their clients, Experian Health needs to prioritize investment in areas that will have the greatest impact and choosing wrong can take development and marketing time away from other initiatives. To make these difficult business decisions, Experian Health needs to understand what their customers value most. Then they can design products that align with their customers’ workflows and deliver exceptional user experiences.

Solution 

Using the Alida platform, Experian Health’s client insights team has created numerous channels to engage with customers. Their insight community, Innovation Studio, is at the heart of their program and enables ongoing, two-way conversations. “Our community helps us be more forward thinking and understand what we want to focus on for product development,” says Darcy Gurley, Client Insights Program Manager.

In addition, Experian Health has begun setting up listening posts by embedding microsurveys within their existing products. “We really had a blind spot when it came to getting user-level feedback to understand the nitty gritty around each product, this allows us to meet them where they are and get in-the-moment feedback,” explains Darcy.

The team is also beginning to conduct in-depth interviews via video to understand user experiences in more detail. “Having the tagging and analysis of videos really cuts down on the work and effort to watch and transcribe recordings.”

To supplement insights from product users, Experian also collects feedback from internal subject matter experts and consultants, giving employees a channel to share what they hear on the front lines and influence the future of the products the company develops.

Experian’s insights team shares findings across the business, including product development, UX, marketing, customer success, and customer support teams. They leverage the results to make a variety of strategic decisions. 

Understanding customer pain points

“When a new Chief Product Officer joined Experian Health, we were able to help her immediately understand users. We asked the community what they would like to tell the new CPO and they responded right away. She was able to get up to speed quickly and she wrote a letter back to the community letting them know she was listening,” Darcy recalls.

Identifying needs and validating product concepts

In the early stages of ideation, Experian Health brings product concepts to members of the insight community to get their take. Participants are motivated to help Experian create products so they can do their jobs more efficiently and in turn deliver greater value to their patients. They tell Experian Health whether they find concepts valuable and worth continued investment and offer suggestions for new features and functions.

“Having tools that help us foster ongoing co-creation with our clients has taken us to new levels as an organization. There is a different kind of confidence and satisfaction that comes from making decisions and implementing changes that you know for certain your customers will love”, says Tanya Thomas, Senior Director of Experience Management. 

In recent years, customer insights have validated and shaped the direction of 7 different Experian Health products, including COVID Payer Alerts Portal, ClaimSource, Medical Necessity, Eligibility, Power Reporting, and Self Serve Financial Assistance Screener. Customers also helped shape a completely new approach to proactive user communications, providing new and improved ways of alerting to product changes, new enhancements, and maintenance and down times. 

Results

Having a direct line to customers allows Experian Health to collect insights at scale without a long lead time. “Innovation Studio has allowed us to be closer to our clients, not just listening to their feedback and using it to inform decisions, but also creating a space for two-way dialogue to engage with them and show them how their feedback has impacted the business,” says Darcy.

For example, when initial surveys revealed that claims denials were a top pain point for Experian Health customers, the insights team dug deeper. The source of dissatisfaction was long processing times and manual guesswork, which validated the need for more automation. Based on those insights, Experian Health developed initial concepts for improving the claims process and shared prototypes with members for continued feedback.

Based on this feedback, Experian Health built and launched AI Advantage, a solution that uses predictive analysis to detect high-risk claims and automatically segments them. Experian’s customers benefit from this new product by saving time and reducing their top pain point. 

For Experian Health, the value of co-creation is clear. By prioritizing solutions for high-pain, high-priority challenges they increase customer satisfaction and can accurately focus development resources. Because concepts have been validated prior to launch, Experian feels confident in product-market fit and faster access to engaged users makes recruiting customers for beta testing and early adoption programs easy. With greater feedback during the development process products can launch quicker and new products tested through the insight community result in immediate cross-sell opportunities. Ultimately, working hand-in-hand with customers has a broad impact on Experian Health’s overall customer satisfaction and retention.