Every organisation now understands customers should be able to engage digitally with their products and services, says Medibank's senior executive of digital services and solutions, Andrew Palmer.
"Customers want to know more and much faster than ever before, and they’ll make their feedback known publicly if you’re not up to scratch," said Mr Palmer.
"Or they’ll take their business elsewhere. One great customer experience, then becomes the new baseline for every other interaction. Companies must find innovative ways to keep-up with customer demand - delivering new capabilities and functionality, whilst making it simple and intuitive."
Mr Palmer recently spoke about Medibank's digital transformation at the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Transformation Days held in Sydney and Melbourne.
"Three years ago, Medibank publicly acknowledged we were falling short in meeting our customers’ expectations. With around 3.7 million customers, those who called the contact centre were sometimes waiting close to 10 minutes. It took a minute to log onto our website and we lacked key functionality. Inflexible technology was a root cause of some of these issues," he said.
"Over the past two years we completely rebuilt and rearchitected our digital platforms, leveraging the latest technologies and methods, to improve every aspect of our digital experience.
"We’ve used best in class tools to remove the need for technology team intervention when we need to scale for performance or amend content, and we’ve embraced modern monitoring, alerting and automation capabilities to ensure the platform performs to its best.
"By leveraging cloud technology, our teams can update our platforms, trial solutions and fix issues efficiently with zero-down time, delivering better customer outcomes at speed and at scale."
Mr Palmer said key success metrics have included a dramatic increase in online registrations with much faster loading times, while the insurer's Net Promoter Score - a tool used to gauge the quality of our customer relationships – has significantly improved.
"Medibank’s mobile app went from one star (lowest rating) to now 4.7 stars in the Apple Store. It’s now the highest rated private health insurance app on the market," he said, adding more customers claiming easily online leads to a reduction in calls to consultants or trips to a shopfront to follow up.