At-scale digital

personalization
A pragmatist’s guide to personalized
experiences in health care

Author: Ben Jonash and David Geisinger

Acknowledgements: Kelly Connors, Darshana Nair,

Suzanne Revere, Chris Valley, Dave Wieneke, Jeanette Yung
Proposaldigital
At-scale title goes
personalization
here |
 Section title goes here

For the past decade, digital teams

across health care organizations have
looked to personalization to improve
their customer experiences. However,
few have developed the organizational
capability to create personalized
engagement across experiences.
Customers face disparate and generic
experiences—from choosing providers
and plans, to engaging in health, to
pricing and paying for services—
all leading to an inefficient use of
resources.

The challenge we see, and the focus

of this series, is getting ahead of what
happens when the vision of making
connected, personalized experiences
runs into the reality and inertia of large
health care organizations. While every
company is different, our experience
has uncovered a set of patterns that
can help streamline the development
of these capabilities and translate
them into more valuable customer
interactions.

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At-scale digital personalization

The case for

personalization
Health care organizations are accelerating a fundamental change optimize around clinically driven outreach while marketing may
in the cadence of care and how consumers navigate their health push messaging across a myriad of channels. Yet, each of these
choices through greater use of telehealth, secure text, and disconnected experiences may put wins on the board, without ever
messaging. These frequent, brief interactions are creating a more approaching the customer’s expectation of a seamless experience,
connected, continuous level of interaction, which is evident in across channels that build on every touchpoint.
payer, provider, pharmaceutical, and even MedTech enterprises.
Health care organizations are establishing the orchestration of We are now at a place where technology can help organizations
automated digital interactions as a core capability in supporting this work through silos and replace homegrown or purpose-built tools
continuously engaged interaction model in health care. with more unified systems. While this brings great promise, leaders
championing personalization should approach these opportunities
Personalization inherently cuts across an organization, but progress with the awareness that technology alone can’t create connected
in health care to date has been largely defined by individual teams health care experiences. It will require new models for measuring
working within constraints of the experiences and channels they value, unifying fragmented teams and technology, and delivering
directly manage. For example, care management teams may customer interactions rather than brand communications.

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At-scale digital personalization

Four foundational elements

of personalization
This series will focus on four key elements that can be challenging for organizations but will ultimately help leaders deliver
personalization at scale:

1. Personalization’s value model: Start with value creation in mind

2. Personalization’s operating model: Connected experiences take connected teams

3. Personalization’s technical and data models: Data is everywhere, but the capability to use it is not

4. Personalization’s omni-channel delivery model: Contextualized experiences do more with more

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At-scale digital personalization

Chapter 1: Value models

Start with value creation in mind Managers may choose from two paths when selecting metrics that
Personalization in health care communication can be applied at any demonstrate the value of personalization. Path one encompasses
stage of the customer life cycle. While that flexibility is a good thing, the more tried-and-true measurement metrics (operating expenses
deciding where to start isn’t always obvious. Measuring its impact (opex), clinical costs, growth, and retention). Path two presents
can be even harder. newer and often more experience-oriented metrics (e.g., NPS,
TrustID).
In this chapter on value models, we take a deep dive into thoughtful
combinations for making a first-year investment case, how that Which path should you choose? Marketing managers may view
relates to your selection of quick wins, and how to mature value newer experience metrics as a lighthouse or bankable value. Thus,
measurement in ways specific to personalization that will guide there is a temptation to take on a broader financial cultural shift
scaled long-term investment and deliver results. to value experience metrics. Our caution is that it is one thing to
report on experience metrics or celebrate positive improvements
Framing personalization as a capability in press releases. It is quite another to have this experience metric
Organizations need to treat personalization and the measurement take a formal seat at the table among traditional CFO metrics. Our
of its impact as an ongoing capability, not a project. It is not a one- advice is to seed the conversation about their potential but be
and-done activity nor is it based on a single point in time. Many prepared to back up your work.
organizations find they do not have the necessary capabilities to
measure, diagnose, and prove its correlated impact. While global Traditional metrics must be part of the story, but our caution is
metrics like net promoter score (NPS) or transactional net promoter they also bring complexity. Avoid the trap of double counting and
score (tNPS) are often a good rallying point, that metric alone overlapping business cases. Our advice for a year-one business
becomes hard to defend given the other factors at play in driving a case is to consider metrics that are meaningful and actionable for
specific score. Very quickly, you may realize that as you implement your effort and allow you to easily report on value creation.
personalized campaigns, performance measurement becomes
an equally important and integrated part of the overall capability.
Measurement becomes especially critical as you move from making
a high-level investment to articulating delivered value.

Choosing the right metrics

Ready to build your first-year business case for personalization? Start
by assessing a mix of business, operating, and experience metrics to
help you measure value creation:

• Business and operating metrics can be grouped into the

five ways they deliver value through customer relationships:
gaining new customers, lengthening the duration of existing
relationships, increasing wallet share with existing customers,
serving customers more efficiently digitally, and gaining referrals.
Each phase of the customer journey should be monitored and
optimized financial returns.

• Experience metrics such as NPS or Star scores are more

summative and are often used as rallying points for companywide
improvement. Companies may project that simplifying payment,
improving products, and diverting calls from over-burdened call
centers could contribute incrementally to improved experiences.
Experience metrics are a great way to indicate improvements that
could lead to a dollar-value impact.

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At-scale digital personalization

Business and Operating Metrics

Cost Saving Metrics
• Medical costs. This metric can often have the largest startup-year Spotlight: Reducing unsubscribe rates through machine
benefit, but anyone who has presented in front of a medical trend learning personalization
committee will tell you it takes real time to actuarially prove. Deloitte helped a leading organization identify four unique machine
learning models to effectively predict and personalize the customer
– Our recommendation: Focus on health programs (often
journey, including scoring more than 2.3 million customers’
vended) that already have a confirmed trend return on
propensities to purchase within 30 days. This personalization
investment, but which suffer from lower adoption. In many
campaign led to a 30% reduction in the unsubscribe rate.
cases, lower adoption is a result of poorly coordinated and
generalized outreach that falls short across multiple steps in
Revenue metrics
the adoption funnel. Here, you can focus on subsegments
• Direct sales. Comparing test results for personalized versus
where you can demonstrate increased enrollment and more
non-personalized programs by looking directly at sales numbers
sustained engagement. To help lower your feasibility hurdle,
provides a quantitative set of measures to help demonstrate the
select programs that require reasonable existing data sharing
impact of personalization.
to enable targeting as well as proof points for engagement.
– Our recommendation: Set a sales target increase related to
• Operational savings (call volume). It is tempting to look at
the scale of your personalization effort. A typical organization
personalization as a way to quickly deflect or remove call center
leveraging personalization techniques sees anywhere from a
volume. The potential is there, yes; but make any promises
5%–35% impact on sales and lifetime value (LTV). The wide range
carefully. Align with service ops and care management on the calls
is due to the broad definition of personalization. On the smaller
that will be affected and how they will be deflected or avoided.
scale, personalization is limited to more salutation and maybe
– Our recommendation: Seek out early wins that target recognition of a previous interaction. More advanced practices
replacing high-cost outbound call volume with lower- include collaborative filtering and specific recommendations or
cost outbound digital messaging. Depending on current content for the specific recipient based on deep analytics.
capabilities, you may also have an opportunity to combine your
• Retention and lifetime value (LTV). Organizations typically
personalization efforts with inflight delivery and communication
think of personalization as a growth driver, but it’s also an
enhancements (e.g., new conversational artificial intelligence,
important retention mechanism. LTV predicts the effect of
care management triggers, more tech investments in email
retention on how much a “customer” will spend over time as they
communications, text messaging).
keep coming back to the organization. Relevancy is key to nurturing
• Operation savings (efficiency gains). Personalization long-term relationships—that means listening to what customers
drives efficiency in getting the “best” message across the first are saying over time and reacting and responding in a relevant and
time. Historically, organizations needed to send a stream of personalized way.
communications to achieve the desired result. Personalization
allows you to more effectively determine the right message to
deliver at the right time, to the right person. That makes the
whole process more efficient and yields faster consumer results.
Automating the personalized communication process drives
even higher communication efficiency. Imagine a world where
data can flow through the experience process, be segmented,
and then be acted upon in a personalized communication, all
in an automated fashion.
– Our recommendation: Start with existing opex metrics
such as cost of customer acquisition, etc. If possible, consider
automating the processes of delivering a personalized
experience to amplify communication efficiency savings. By
automating personalization, you can speed up the time it takes
to deliver a personalized experience and free up valuable time
and resources.

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At-scale digital personalization

– Our recommendation: Track existing retention metrics such Spotlight: Increasing retention and driving efficiency through
as churn and couple them with sales for calculating increases faster personalized creative
in LTV. From a customer journey perspective, health plan For a large domestic organization, Deloitte introduced a solution that
enrollment and onboarding often represent an attractive place was able to build creative 50% faster than the client’s internal efforts
to start. These initial periods typically include many predictable by leveraging our personalization engine’s timely and targeted
moments (e.g., first prescription fill) that can be considered with delivery. The result? Email engagement was elevated by 265%,
the customer segments most likely to have negative experiences. and retention increased by 9.3%, saving more than $170 million in
Estimating increases in LTV can also help you determine the revenue when forecasted annually.
customer acquisition costs that would be appropriate to achieve
that increase.

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At-scale digital personalization

Experience Metrics Setting a defensible baseline

NNow you have a starting list of potential metrics to measure
the value of your personalization effort. We recommend that you
• Trust and brand value. Simply put, personalization results in start by analyzing the strategy behind your personalization effort
more relevant experiences that improve customer satisfaction and the type of value play you aim to make. For example, is your
and drive increases in trust and brand value. In all aspects personalization effort aimed at reducing call volume or driving new
of our life, when people speak to us in terms we understand, sales? Once your strategy is set, prioritize tracking the metrics that
and in a meaningful way, we react positively. We engage more, will best support your case.
communicate more, spend more, and generally, we trust more.
– Our recommendation: Measure increases in customer No matter which metrics you anchor to your investment case, our
brand perception and trust (e.g., TrustID) in the brand resulting advice is to get started as soon as possible and set a measurable,
from personalization efforts. Trust can be measured in terms actionable baseline. Most companies eager to progress their
of increased perceived competency in the brand due to personalization maturity quickly run into the challenge of
personalized experiences. We have found that customers are measuring experiential value. While industry-accepted metrics exist
2.4X more likely to repeat purchase if they trust in the brand’s (NPS, TrustID, etc.), the tooling typically lags in availability across
competency. Another area of trust that cannot be taken for channels and in a level of granularity where cause-and-effect is
granted is using data for personalization while safeguarding clearly evident. Set your baseline, and develop a measurement plan
consumer privacy. Brands should measure the effect of to demonstrate how you are delivering impact.
personalization on a customer’s perceived positive intent
and transparency of the company. Get your case, and get started
No matter what metrics you choose, our caution is to avoid
Spotlight: Increasing trust and reducing churn through exhausting all of your resources on making the business case
personalized trust-based targeting perfect. Our advice is to expend minimum effort to move from
Deloitte worked with a leading health care organization to predict planning to activity so that your personalization capability doesn’t
customer trust and drive trust-based targeting, resulting in a 33% lose momentum.
increase in trust, 15% higher website views, and 5% less churn.
Establishing a value case and an effective measurement model is just
the beginning. Our next chapter outlines how to achieve this value
• Net Promoter Score (NPS). Another way to look at the effects of
by aligning on an operating model that bridges across what are often
personalization is to measure changes in a customer’s NPS. Some
siloed yet highly dependent areas for personalization.
of the best customers might not be the highest spenders, but they
may be evangelists for the brand. A customer who recommends a
product or service to their family and friends can drive significantly
more value than just one customer’s spending. Personalization
impacts the social and emotional side of the experience and helps
drive an individual’s willingness to share that experience with
others.
– Our watch-out: NPS is a point-in-time metric tied to a single
survey with a limited number of questions used to define the
whole experience. We recommend looking at the entirety of
the personalized interactions across all channels and measure
frequently as each experience can shift the “value metric” in one
direction. A statistically valid set of data points must be collected
to accurately represent the true impact of your personalization
efforts on NPS.

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At-scale digital personalization

Conclusion

For most health care organizations, the personalization journey has experience, organizations can build new alignment, focus on results,
begun, though its progress may seem slow and indeterminant. For and commit to unified approaches to customer experience—not
those leading the charge, especially those in enterprises with legacy as a prerequisite for progress, but as the benefit of this journey to
systems and structures, the path forward may seem vexingWe know personalization at enterprise scale.
how complexity, inertia, and cultural reluctance can slow change. But
we also know that leaders can successfully navigate choices to make
progress that is possible. And by advancing the digital customer

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