Hello, everyone. This is Jacob Emerson with the
Becker's Payer Issues podcast.
Thrilled today to be joined by Mac McGee,
who is the chief marketing officer at CareFirst
Blue Cross Blue Shield. Mac, thank you so
much for taking the time to be with
me on the podcast today.
Awesome, Jacob. Thanks so much for having me.
Absolutely. Glad you could be with us. And
before we dive into everything we wanna talk
with you about, can you tell us a
little bit more about yourself, your background in
health care, and what it is that you're
doing today at CareFirst?
Sure. So, I'm chief marketing officer at CareFirst
Blue Cross Blue Shield. Been here for five
years now.
This is actually my first full time foray
into the health care landscape.
Prior to this, really spent a lot of
my career on the agency side building brands
focused on creating demand, and then ultimately conversions
or commerce,
for those brands, and certainly worked with companies
in the health care space throughout that career,
but was excited about the opportunity to come
in and, actually joined CareFirst during the height
of the pandemic,
in July 2020, and I've been here ever
since overseeing everything from brand and advertising to
insights, experience, analytics, and engagement,
as well as our communications function.
Fantastic. So one thing that really caught our
eye, Mac, about CareFirst recently in the news
is the company being named the top performing
insurer for customer experience in 2025
by Forrester.
That was a report that came out earlier
this year,
this summer. They analyzed insurance companies from all
over the country about their their customer experience
performance from a variety of metrics.
And, you know, as I just mentioned, CareFirst
came out on top, across every insurance company
or major insurance company in the country. So
talk to us about what you think has
has led to this, this this acknowledgment that
the company is doing so well among among
your customers,
strategies,
initiatives that you really think has contributed to
this top ranking and and, ultimately, how you
are maintaining this level of performance above
all the other insurers.
Sure. I think so. First and foremost, without
being cliche, it does start with, I think,
just the executive leadership team's support of creating
a culture around it. And I would say
that's something that has been universally true, for
five years now at CareFirst. It's just a
support and really commitment to this idea of
creating that member centricity culture,
which I think can feed this in so
many different ways. And what I really appreciate
about the Forrester
program,
is the way it looks at not only
just brand experience, but then customer experience,
and the way these two play off of
each other. And it's really fascinating as you
get to the data to see that, and
I think something that certainly chief marketing officers,
chief experience officers,
can really appreciate as to how these two
move together.
And so for us, it's really been about
kind of building that foundational
culture,
to bring everybody to that experience no matter
what their day to day job might be,
in order to then make sure that as
we take on the various tasks that it
takes to run a health insurance company,
they're really thinking about that and thinking about
that member centricity in their approach,
because that's really where a lot of it
happens. You know? I tell everybody we can
build products. We can launch great digital tools,
but if the interactions
themselves
aren't truly trustful at the end of the
day and they aren't meaningful to the the
customer and the consumer,
you're only gonna get so far. And I
think that's something we've been really fortunate,
as we've been on this journey and continue
on this journey,
is to have that support and buy in,
and a great team that's continuing to find
ways to bring that member experience to the
forefront no matter what folks at CareFirst may
be doing in order to make sure that
we're continuing to push ourselves and think about
how we continue to be an experience focused
culture.
Absolutely. It makes a lot of sense. Strong
culture, strong leadership, all driving toward this one
common goal.
I should mention for our audience, Mac, that
the that the Forrester report,
it it mentioned that customer experience scores across
the the broader insurance industry have have worsened
over the past few years, and I'm sure
that's not a surprise to, many of our
our listeners.
But, you know, we're we're seeing insurers
lag behind in areas like brand experience, customer
service, and and that's been backed up by
other,
customer experience reports we've seen from other groups
over the last few months and few years.
So
more broadly for for the for the leaders
listening in, what do you think that other
parts of the industry where do you think
other parts of the industry are are falling
short, and and where do you see opportunities
for improvement? Where could other companies,
follow the lead of of CareFirst?
Yeah. It's been interesting, Jacob, in talking with,
both folks inside of industry and outside of
industry and whether it's been chief marketing officers,
with other companies or chief experience officers. You
know, we we talk about this a lot
and this idea of you really gotta look
at what's happening in outside consumer interactions and
how that's influencing
experience expectations. And so I think when you
see what came out from Forrester
in an industry like ours that was admittedly
had a lot of opportunity in front of
it it many years ago as it related
to, you know, the opportunities to optimize and
improve things like customer member experience,
you have to continue to pay attention to
these outside forces.
And I go back, you know, my time
in the agency world. We used to talk
about what happened with Google search when autofill
came in and just what what that did
for for the consumer around being able to
not have to even complete a search query
to ultimately get results.
And then you look certainly,
you know, it would be lost without mentioning
just the impact of what AI and AI
type interactions are
doing, to consumer experience. And so I think
what you're really continuing to see is this
ongoing rebaselining
of consumer expectations and the industry not moving
fast enough and already being behind,
that's really being a detriment to to a
lot of what is the customer or member
experience in this case. And so you think
about what things you'll see in in in
Forrester studies and hear from experienced professionals.
Right? This this starts ultimately,
at trust, and and so much of trust
is tied to personalization. And we've seen this
in our internal studies as well as the
external measurement programs as to how personalization
and trust move together.
Right? And members or consumers really know, like,
does the brand know who I am? It's
really just a a simple starting point of
the interactions they have. And so, you know,
thinking about what's happening in that space, and
then thinking about frictionless. Right? And I think
this is, again, two main areas that AI
is really continuing to push, not just in
terms of what the AI technology is, how
you're seeing it present itself in terms of
online commerce and ordering from day to day
things consumers are interacting with, as well as
other industries, quite frankly, hospitality
and the finance industry doing a lot of
leading work in this space. And so you
look then back at ours and you go,
okay. Well, frictionless,
where where do we create friction? Right? And
you think about things like prior auth, and
you're seeing the industry even now come together
in 2025 and go, we've gotta create some
standardizations
here because we're doing these things too independently
at the detriment of the consumer.
And so we've gotta make wider sweeping changes
there in order for that to happen. There's
no doubt, obviously, since the events in December
'24,
the stories around claim denials. Right? And so
these things represent friction.
And I think as we think about experience
today and what consumers expect,
they don't care about your business processes and
practices.
If those need to be in place, they
didn't happen in the background. Right? And so
simple things like single sign on, you know,
and really making sure that you're creating a
frictionless
environment
and interaction for the consumers. And so I
think we're just seeing ongoing rebaselining and the
expectations just growing and growing from consumers on
what they want. And it's incumbent on us
to meet that challenge. And I think we
admit that we got a lot of opportunity
in this industry,
with our abilities to inject this in. We
have to be cautious as we think about
opportunities in that space around AI and automation.
But there's a lot of opportunity here that
I think is gonna go a long way
in just helping consumers with what I think
is some relatively basic expectations
around being able to self serve at greater
capacities in this industry and meet, you know,
industry wide benchmarks. And at the same time,
just being able to do the things they
need to do to navigate the health care
experience easier.
Definitely. And it's interesting you say that the
industry needs to look more externally because we've
we've heard that before from from leaders all
over the country in terms of wanting to
emulate more the airline industry or or or
what you mentioned, the hospitality industry and make
things so much easier
for customers. And and one thing one challenge
we always hear is that it's just it's
such a everyone's working in different spaces and
silos, and and it's such a complex industry.
It's so difficult to to change things for
the better. And I think, you know, that's
I think that's a pretty fair thing to
say towards someone in your role as working
as a as a chief marketing officer in
this space is that it's it's a very
difficult industry. It's it's very complex. It's very
emotional from the member side of things. And
and what we've just talked about, the customer
expectations are so quickly evolving in what can
be a very rigid space. So
with all that being said, Mac, from your
experience now at CareFirst,
what do you think is key to successfully
navigating all these challenges and really achieving that
sustained
success that we've now seen CareFirst,
be able to do?
Yeah. I think first is we've gotta throw
that storyline out. Right? I think for too
long, we've existed on the idea. These things
are too complex. Right? And there's too much
around it, whether it's regulation and product design,
benefit design. And and so we've gotta challenge
ourselves that that excuse
isn't going to be tolerated anymore. And you've
seen it, in the startup world as things
come in and try and really challenge the
systems in place. And what it's often doing
is nothing more than simplifying. And so, you
know, one of the things culturally we've really
established as we think about experience strategy,
and journey mapping for our members is this
idea of moments of truth.
When you identify those moments of truth, how
do you look at those and really challenge
on what makes for a better consumer experience
today than what we're offering? And so you
think about, you know, when people buy products
upfront.
And this is like a very basic interaction
for us, but it's something that we've really
gotta think about of what are we doing
to educate that member in that capacity. And
for so long, we accepted things like providing
a glossary of our own terminology as a
way of educating,
consumers around buying. That's not good enough. Right?
The fact that we even have to offer
the glossary, I think, should tell us something,
right, about what we're doing. But thinking about
people buying, people buying for me or people
buying for us, right, which is often happening
in our world, and how do you create
better education, better shopping experiences that account for
that. And we've seen a big lift there
just in in the way in which we
talk with our members or potential members during
that purchase process,
and really trying to work now with our
partners,
on how we scale those efforts to bring
that experience to members as they purchase knowing
that that's at the very outset of our
relationship gonna start things off. And then looking
at those other moments of truth when people
are calling in to try and estimate costs
for various procedures,
when they receive an EOB. What does that
EOB look like? What is the language we
use in it? And really trying to think
about those pieces,
and adopting this idea of being simple, clear,
and human and challenging ourselves
across the journey as to anywhere where we're
not living up to that and how we
might challenge those
interactions to meet that opportunity to be simple,
clear, and human is something we're really taking
on internally
in so much of what we're doing, as
well as the folks that are ultimately answering
the phone at the end of the day.
And our and our folks do a phenomenal
job of this, and I'd argue that so
much of the success you're seeing right now
is those interactions
that we see from people that do have
to call in and are looking for guidance
and help. And what can be a really
vulnerable moment in their life, whether they're dealing
with something health related, but also is inevitably
something financially related and and having someone they
feel like they can trust to talk to.
Absolutely. So throwing out that old playbook of,
you know, things are too complex, too rigid
for change, to occur. It's it's fascinating to
hear you say that, Mac.
Before we go, what else are we missing?
You've got the ears of a lot of
other health plan leaders from all over the
country. What else do you wanna share with
them?
I think that really interesting thing to me
in in looking at this year's results in
this particular study, but something we've really been
trying to look at for a while now,
is is just the relationship and play between
brand and experience. Right? And I think we
we we talk about this a lot as
to, you know, the brand that shows up
in your respective market versus the experience your
current customers have and how much daylight is
there between those two things. And so I
think what what I'd encourage other leaders to
look at, whether you look at the results
of your own performance in a study like
this or at least just conceptually what this
third party research and and a company like
Forrester is showing is just how much play
there is between these two places and the
way you've gotta really look at them together
as to how experience is an extension of
brand and brand is an extension of experience.
And I think you've gotta think about that
strategy holistically
and pay attention to both what your customers
are telling you today in that as well
as what is the market saying. And if
your ultimate goal, like many, is growth and
and retention certainly is looking at how are
we able to engage that audience and what
are the challenges ahead of us as we
try and generate new growth and really understand
what our challenges are in that space, what
our opportunities to lean into that space, but
how these things connect together. And I think
this is something that, marketing leaders and experienced
leaders have talked about for quite some time,
but there's gotta be really tight connectivity between
these functions if you are going to be
successful
as you endeavor on this journey. And I
think that's a real opportunity for everybody to
lean into.
Fantastic. It's great. Last bits of advice. Mac,
I wanna thank you for taking the time
to chat with us and for sharing your
insights with our listeners. We really appreciate it.
Thanks so much for having me, Jacob. Really
appreciate the opportunity. Yeah. Absolutely. And to our
listeners, if you wanna listen to more podcasts
from Becker's HealthCare, you can visit beckershospitalreview.com.