US Health Insurers’ CX In 2023: Stable, Trending Toward Stagnant

US Health Insurers’ CX In 2023: Stable, Trending Toward Stagnant Judy Weader

If there’s a hair’s breadth between keeping pace and treading water, the US health insurance industry is balancing right on it. In our latest report, The US Health Insurers Customer Experience Index Rankings, 2023, we reviewed and dissected the latest Customer Experience Index (CX Index™) data for the industry — and became keenly aware of just how many things haven’t changed. On the one hand, that’s fairly comforting. Up until 2022, the US health insurance industry had improved over consecutive years, climbing from the CX Index’s cellar into the low end of the middle of the pack out of all industries covered in Forrester’s Customer Experience Benchmark study. On the other hand, the lack of progress is also terribly frustrating for those of us who follow the health insurance industry closely, watching as consumers’ expectations continue to rise and health insurers’ CX struggles to keep pace.

At a high level, we found that:

• Key ratings are essentially unchanged from 2022. Fewer than half of respondents said the experiences they have with their health insurer are worth their effort or worth their time, and just under two-thirds felt positive about the ease of those experiences. Hybrid experiences, where a member interacts with their health insurer through a combination of physical and digital channels, continue to outperform those that are physical-only or digital-only.
• Humana and Kaiser Permanente are holding firm with the number one and number two highest scores, respectively. Humana held onto the top spot with an increase that moved the insurer into uncharted territory for the industry: a “Good” rating. Last year’s second top-rated health insurer, Kaiser Permanente, retained its position in 2023. There was some movement elsewhere in the rankings, the most notable driven by a statistically significant score decline for UnitedHealthcare.
• Members’ perception of experience quality can range wildly. We took a closer look at three key segments in this study: Privately insured versus Medicare-related members (members with group or individual commercial plans versus those with Medicare Advantage or Medicare Supplemental plans); Captive members versus non-captive members (those without choice of insurer versus those with choice); and Devotees versus non-devotees (read Pete Jacques’s primer on devotees to learn more about these valuable super-customers). In each of these analyses, we found differences that strengthen the case for improving member experience consistency across the entire book of business rather than just at the product or line of business level.

We’ll be exploring these three findings (and many more) in a webinar on Thursday, July 13, 1:00–2:00 p.m. ET. We hope you can join us, either by watching it live or catching it on-demand. If you’re not a Forrester client and you’d like to watch the webinar, please contact your sales partner and tell them, “I want Forrester Decisions!”

Daniel Portillo contributed to this blog.