In a new customer experience survey, health insurers are just above the bottom, perhaps in part because the nature of the service and the industry's legacy. But some still came ahead with positive reviews.
Health insurers have overall poor consumer experience ratings, perceived as better than only television and Internet providers and car rental centers in a survey spanning 20 industries by the Temkin Group.
The Massachusetts-based Temkin Group asked 10,000 Americans to rate their interactions with 293 companies based on three dimensions: success, effort and emotion.
The top five rate companies are grocery chains, the highest being Publix Super Markets, a Florida-based employee-owned chain, followed by Aldi and the Texas food store chain H-E-B. Other retail companies that are inspiring healthcare organizations were in the top 10, including PetSmart and Amazon.com.
"At the other end of the spectrum, Coventry Health Care, Fox Rent A Car, Comcast, and Fujitsu earned the lowest ratings," wrote Bruce Temkin, managing partner of the research outfit.
"On an industry level, supermarket chains, fast food chains, retailers, parcel delivery services, and banks all earned 'good' ratings on average, whereas Internet service providers, TV service providers, and health plans received 'poor' ratings on average," wrote Temkin, a veteran of Forrester Research.
The survey asked consumers to evaluate their experiences with different companies over the past 60 days based on a seven-point scale on questions of getting what they wanted, effort involved and the general reaction. The first question was: "Thinking of your most recent interactions with each of these companies, to what degree were you able to accomplish what you wanted to do?"
The health insurers ranked include Aetna (which also owns Coventry), Anthem, BCBS of Florida, BCBS of Michigan, Blue Shield of California, Cigna, Health Net, Humana, Kaiser Permanente, Medicaid, Medicare, TriCare and UnitedHealthcare.
Nine of those were in the bottom 50 of the 293. Aetna, Anthem and BCBS of Michigan tied at number 264, Medicaid ranked at 270, Cigna at 274, BCS at 278, BCBS of Florida at 281, Health Net at 288 and Coventry at 293--just below Fox Rent A Car and Comcast.
The bottom 13 companies in the ratings include three health plans, two rental car agencies, two major appliance makers (Fujitsu and Hitachi), two Internet service providers (Comcast and Time Warner), one TV provider (Comcast), one airline (Spirit Airlines), a software maker (Blackboard), and a utility company (Consolidated Edison of NY).
Notably, though, three health plans came ahead in the rankings. Tricare, the military health plan, ranked highest among the health insurers, exceeding the industry average by 13 percentage points with a score of 67 percent, not too far below the top score of 85 percent for Publix.
Kaiser Permanente exceeded the industry average by 11 points, and Humana exceeded by 8 points. Medicaid, which of course can vary greatly across states, also increased in its perception this year, by six points.
Temkin has been doing this survey for five years, and until this year health plan ratings were actually going up, coinciding with the advent of health reform and the phasing in of new consumer protections.
Healthcare is quite different than many of the other industries ranked--and consumers may only be interacting with their health plan when there is a dispute or complaint, such as a denied claim, prior authorization or drug access issue. Nonetheless, health insurers and healthcare providers are being challenged to emulate the likes of Trader Joe's or Amazon, or at least learn something from the two retail icons.
The consumer experience by industry, as ranked by the Temkin Group survey:
