Dynamics: Coordinating Business Functions

Mark Poling, Co-Founder and CEO, Colibrium

Facilitating Customer Engagement for Health Insurers 

HGS Colibrium, provides Tuo® 360, a Dynamics CRM overlay designed specifically for health insurance plans. The health insurance industry is experiencing a massive shift to consumerism. As a result, the need and demand for CRM capabilities to enable health insurers to engage with their customers is at a level they historically have not had to.

The term CRM is many times misunderstood and also means a lot of different things to different people and users. At the highest level, Dynamics encompasses Marketing Automation, Sales Force Automation and Service Automation, three very different, but ideally coordinated functions in any business. Tuo 360 for Dynamics provides health insurers industry-specific capabilities across all three major functions.

Managing Data in Healthcare 

We are seeing Dynamics adoption increase and believe this trend will continue in our industry. Health plans need flexible, scalable and modern platforms that can integrate easily across multiple systems. Health plans have an enormous amount of data. They not only need to manage it, but also they need to leverage it to make informed, real-time decisions. Dynamics is enabling them to utilize the data to drive automation, get the right information to the right people in real time and enable marketing precision to new and existing members. Ultimately, this improves customer acquisition, service, and retention levels.

 Dynamics encompasses Marketing Automation, Sales Force Automation and Service Automation, three very different, but ideally coordinated functions in any business 

Health insurers have an abundant amount of data and information about their members. They know member demographics, where they work, when they’re sick, healthy, etc. The plans with robust wellness plans many times know what members are eating and when they exercise, or don’t take care of themselves. We are using Dynamics to help plans leverage that data not just to provide a 360ᵒ view of their members, but to engage and build a relationship with them.  A view is passive. Leveraging CRM is actionable, and enables a health plan to respond to the data in a manner that is specific to a member. That is when CRM has reached its full potential and when adoption significantly increases.

Addressing Complexities in Real Time

Most health insurers have complex legacy systems in terms of data structures and integration complexity. This often leads health insurers to implement many of the same complexities in their CRM solution, which leaves several of their problems unaddressed. Tuo 360 for Dynamics helps to ensure this doesn’t happen as 1) it is pre integrated with Tuo Marketplace, enabling real-time management of their online retail presence through Dynamics and 2) the complex data structures that exist with brokers, agencies, members, subscribers and policies that are already within Dynamics.

Dynamics in Demand

Health insurers have never needed Dynamics more than they do today. Historically, health insurers have struggled to deploy CRM successfully, resulting in too many silo’d implementations, where hundreds of hours were spent simply overcomplicating things. High needs, a complex environment and a powerful technology in Dynamics can be a dangerous combination without industry expertise. This expertise is what I believe, to be the driving force behind the success and high adoption of our Dynamics implementations. 

Proper Implementation of Dynamics 

Understand your vision, where you want to be and where Dynamics fits in that equation. Prioritize carefully and question harshly “the way it has always been done”. Lastly, find a partner that has implemented Dynamics over and over again.

No CRM will be successful without user adoption. It’s imperative that Dynamics is implemented correctly in order to drive user adoption. This means integration, screens, information, workflows and usability must provide benefits to users, making them more productive and effective. You won’t achieve optimal results without user adoption and getting there requires a productive combination of design, training, coaching, monitoring and continuously improving.

Focus on your core business, and enlist a trusted partner with the proven expertise to move your sales and service functions to an automation platform and to the cloud. With the rate of change in health insurance, health plans need to focus on proactively and effectively addressing these dynamics so that they become differentiating opportunities to the organization instead of threats and challenges. A flexible CRM platform and a trusted partner are the two critical factors required to make real-time decisions that are most important to the organization, enabling operational efficiencies, reduced costs and higher levels of customer satisfaction.