How cloud technology is driving a new experience for Medibank customers

In every organisation, there’s now an expectation that your customers should be able to engage digitally with your products and services.

Customers want to know more and much faster than ever before, and they’ll make their feedback known publicly if you’re not up to scratch. Or they’ll take their business elsewhere. One great customer experience, then becomes the new baseline for every other interaction. Companies must find innovative ways to keep-up with customer demand - delivering new capabilities and functionality, whilst making it simple and intuitive.

Last week, I shared Medibank’s digital transformation journey at the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Transformation Days held in Sydney and Melbourne. Joined by Australian and international business and technology leaders, we heard how the use of cloud technology is transforming organisations and improving the overall digital experience for customers.

Three years ago, Medibank publicly acknowledged we were falling short in meeting our customers’ expectations. With around 3.7 million customers, those who called the contact centre were sometimes waiting close to 10 minutes. It took a minute to log onto our website and we lacked key functionality. Inflexible technology was a root cause of some of these issues.

Over the past two years we completely rebuilt and rearchitected our digital platforms, leveraging the latest technologies and methods, to improve every aspect of our digital experience. We’ve used best in class tools to remove the need for technology team intervention when we need to scale for performance or amend content, and we’ve embraced modern monitoring, alerting and automation capabilities to ensure the platform performs to its best.

By leveraging cloud technology, our teams can update our platforms, trial solutions and fix issues efficiently with zero-down time, delivering better customer outcomes at speed and at scale.

Our approach was mobile first, as customers need to be able to manage their health on-the-go. We took advantage of a cloud-only approach, in order to deliver customer improvements as quickly and easily as possible. We are constantly increasing the number of functional releases to our production platforms, delivering change that now supports and enables customer demand and expectations.

Over the past two years, some of the key success metrics include the dramatic increase in online registrations with much faster loading times, our Net Promoter Score - a tool used to gauge the quality of our customer relationships – has significantly improved, and there’s strong growth in digital sales. Medibank’s mobile app went from one star (lowest rating) to now 4.7 stars in the Apple Store. It’s now the highest rated private health insurance app on the market.

The retail store and contact centre experiences have also benefitted from the digital investments, transforming the way we communicate with customers. There are now more customers claiming easily online, with a reduction in calls to consultants or trips to a store to follow up.

At the heart of any transformation is having a plan of where you want to be. Being ‘customer obsessed’ was the driving force behind our successful digital transformation, which is now a differentiator across the market. We know that affordability in healthcare is an issue, and through providing intuitive, low cost digital capabilities, it’s part of solving that challenge.