Will CIGNA free its customers of “insurance-ese?”

I’ve noticed recently that CIGNA is making a lot of noise about their Customer Experience, and when I spotted the press release about ’shattering industry stereotypes with crystal clear customer communications’ I knew I had to share.

Before I begin, I have to admit I don’t quite see the triggering need CIGNA uniquely solves for its members. If we asked them “What problem are you solving that’s unique to CIGNA?” I wonder what the answer might be. Since the success of any customer experience lies in if – and how well – you solve a need, problem or desire for your customers, knowing what you solve is the first step of any customer experience.

However, that being said, I DO think they’ve laid out a terrific approach to strengthening the communication and service elements of the experience they provide to patients/customers.

CIGNA set up a Customer Experience team whose mission is:

To help individuals enrolled in CIGNA plans achieve their health goals with helpful information, trusted support and excellent service. To do that we must: communicate simply, consistently, and in ways they find personally relevant, compelling and easy to understand.

It’s a great idea. They’ve started to tackle is the insurance-ese we’ve all fought with (remember how we talked about making customers jump through linguistic hoops?), and they’ve redesigned their Explanation of Benefits to help their customers understand where the money’s going.

What I like so much about the CIGNA approach is that they’ve articulated why they’re changing, what the plan is, and what’s been done so far. I like that the changes they’re working on should strengthen their experience while improving financial performance – fewer questions and problems will drive down the cost to serve customers.  And I imagine there was some candid fact sharing in the conversation that triggered this effort, about how they got to where they are.

Of course, what really matters here is how these new policies impact CIGNA customers and CIGNA performace. I did a few Twitter searches to see if any CIGNA members were talking about these new changes. Most of what I found was other PR people tweeting about the press release that caught my eye. So it remains to be seen how customers will react to these changes. What do you think? Are you a CIGNA customer have you been helped by the new customer experience mission?