About 3½ years ago, leaders at Wellabe, a Des Moines-based life and health insurance company, started working on an initiative revolving around keeping their customers engaged and satisfied, with the goal of improving loyalty.
Susan Kelly, Wellabe’s director of member transformation, posed the question: “Have we ever just asked our customers, ‘What keeps them up at night, what concerns them about their health and well being, and what do they expect their insurance companies to actually do about that?’”
That question became part of the impetus to launch the Wellabe Be Well Buddies, a program where customers are paired up with employees, who seek to learn more about their target users. At its outset, there were 25 pairs. Now there are about 1,000 customers willing and ready to be interviewed and surveyed by Wellabe, Kelly said.
The company has expanded the program beyond the small group meetings via Zoom monthly, to a broader audience who have signed up to provide leaders with regular feedback and insights via digital surveys, said Janssen Judge, customer engagement communication manager at Wellabe.
“We are also leveraging this group for focused customer research, sharing new features or offerings with them first so we can continue to learn and iterate quickly,” Judge said in an email. “We want to continue facilitating a sense of pride in co-creation with our customers and find new opportunities to learn directly from them.”
Kelly said sometimes the perception is that insurance companies are out for themselves and “that’s not what Wellabe stands for.”
“We’re committed to always delivering on our brand promise for our customers. You’re paying your premiums. We want to deliver on our promise of paying your claims, but also being a partner in your health and well being, so to me, it made a lot of sense to start opening those channels up.”
In response to the insights leaders gathered from their users, they built a rewards program called Wellabe Rewards.
Customers collect points for rewards by engaging in health activities such as reading health-related articles, doing workout videos or online meditation opportunities, taking surveys and becoming a buddy.
“We give them points for healthy activity screenings,” Kelly said. “In this coming year, and this is another learning from our members, they want to connect their wearable for meeting health goals. So that is something we are looking at enabling next year.”
The rewards customers receive include benefits from Audible, peer-to-peer therapy services, Noom, Weight Watchers, and end-of-life planning and care services through the Urbandale-based startup Tumbleweed.
The Wellabe Be Well Buddies participants directly influenced the rewards that were selected, Kelly said.
“It’s built by them, for them,” Kelly said.
Buddies are also company beta testers, she said. Before they launched the rewards program, they gave buddies access to the rewards platform, sat in Zoom meetings and watched them navigate, she said.
“We took all of their feedback to heart,” she said.
The company launched the rewards program in June with the anticipation it would have 1% of its eligible population using it by the end of the year.
“We’ve surpassed 2% as of this morning, and I think we’ll hit 5% by the end of the year, which is exciting,” she said.
Among the most important insights company leaders learned from the buddies program was that their customers want to be active and healthy.
“They want to battle social isolation by being out in the community,” she said. “It’s those things that helped me put a face behind the programs that we were building, and that was massively important.”