Medibank today said it was pleased to see the improvements it has made for its customers reflected in its falling share of Private Health Insurance Ombudsman industry complaints – down by more than a third, from 60.7 per cent in September 2016, to 37.8 per cent in the latest quarter.
Today’s release of the Ombudsman’s quarterly complaint statistics for January to March 2017 also revealed Medibank has more than halved its disputes (cases which the Ombudsman has to escalate), from 42.9 per cent to 17.2 per cent.
Medibank Chief Customer Officer David Koczkar said the result showed the company was listening and responding to its customers.
“Our customers told us we weren’t delivering what they expected from us, and so we’ve made improvements across the board to provide them with better service and products,” said Mr Koczkar.
“From adding value back in to products, to picking up the phone twice as fast, to releasing a new version of our mobile app – we’ve been taking action to address our customers’ feedback and frustrations.
“We’ve also overhauled our complaint resolution processes and established a taskforce to address the root causes of complaints, and ensure that when our customers have an issue it gets to the right people faster, and they are able to resolve it faster.
“In November last year we committed to reducing our share of Ombudsman complaints under our market share within a year, and while we have more to do, we’re on the right track, ,” he said.
Medibank attributes the marked improvement in its Ombudsman complaints to:
· Adding value back in to products for more than a million customers (including a 100 per cent back key benefits, such as 100 per cent back on an annual dental check-up at a Members’ Choice dentist)
· Including cover for accidents for all customers with hospital cover, and emergency ambulance cover for all customers
· Reducing its average call wait time from 6 minutes to 3 minutes and falling
· Hiring 60 additional contact centre employees
· Launching 24/7 online customer service and opening contact centre on Saturdays
· Launching a new and improved version of its app
· Launching a Health Concierge service to help customers prepare for and recover from hospital stays
· Returning 100 per cent of the savings from the Government’s prostheses reform to customers through the lowest premium increase in 15 years
· Announcing a partnership with Healthshare to improve transparency around the potential for out of pocket costs with specialists
· Rewriting of 320 pieces of communication to simplify language
