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Becker’s Healthcare Podcast
Mack McGee, Chief Marketing Officer at CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield
00:14:11
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Transcript15 lines
- [00:00]
A
Hello everyone, this is Jacob Emerson with the Becker's Payer Issues podcast. Thrilled today to be joined by Mac McGee, who is the Chief Marketing Officer at CareFirst Blue Cross Blue Shield. Mac, thank you so much for taking the time to be with me on the podcast today.
- [00:15]
B
Awesome, Jacob, thanks so much for having me.
- [00:17]
A
Absolutely glad you could be with us. And before we dive into everything we want to talk with you about, can you tell us a little bit more about yourself, your background in healthcare and what it is that you're doing today at CareFirst?
- [00:28]
B
Sure. So I'm chief marketing officer at CareFirst Blue Cross Blue Shield. Been here for five years now. This is actually my first full time foray into the healthcare landscape. Prior to this, really spent a lot of my career on the agency side building brands focused on creating demand and then ultimately conversions or commerce for those brands. And certainly worked with companies in the healthcare space throughout that career, but was excited about the opportunity to come in and actually join CareFirst during the height of the pandemic in July of 2020 and have been here ever since overseeing everything from brand and advertising to insights, experience, analytics and engagement, as well as our communications function.
- [01:09]
A
Fantastic. So one thing that really caught our eye, Mac, about CareFirst recently in the news is the company being named the top performing insurer for customer experience in 2025 by Forrester. That was a report that came out earlier this year. This summer they analyzed insur from all over the country about their customer experience performance from a variety of metrics and as I just mentioned, CareFirst came out on top across every insurance company or major insurance company in the country. So talk to us about what you think has led to this acknowledgment that the company is doing so well among your customers strategies, initiatives that you really think has contributed to this top ranking and ultimately how you are maintaining this level of performance above all the other insurers.
- [02:02]
B
Sure, I think so first and foremost, without being cliche, it does start with, I think just the executive leadership team support of creating a culture around it. And I would say that's something that has been universally true for five years now at CareFirst. Just a support and really commitment to this idea of creating that member centricity culture which I think can feed this in so many different ways. And what I really appreciate about the Forrester program is the way it looks at not only just brand experience, but then customer experience and the way these two play off of each other. And it's really fascinating as you get to the data to see that. And I think something that certainly chief marketing officers, chief experience officers can really appreciate as to how these two move together. And so for us, it's really been about kind of building that foundational culture to bring everybody to that experience, no matter what their day to day job might be, in order to then make sure that as we take on the various tasks that it takes to run a health insurance company, they're really thinking about that and thinking about that member centricity and their approach because that's really where a lot of it happens. You know, I tell everybody we can build products, we can launch great digital tools, but if the interactions themselves aren't truly trustful at the end of the day and they aren't meaningful to the customer and the consumer, you're only going to get so far. And I think that's something we've been really fortunate as we've been on this journey and continue on this journey is to have that support and buy in and a great team that's continuing to find ways to bring that member experience to the forefront, no matter what folks at CareFirst may be doing in order to make sure that we're continuing to push ourselves and think about how we continue to be an experience. Focus culture.
- [03:43]
A
Absolutely. It makes a lot of sense. Strong culture, strong leadership, all driving toward this one common goal. I should mention for our audience, Mac, that the Forrester report, it mentioned that customer experience scores across the broader insurance industry have, have worsened over the past few years. And I'm sure that's not a surprise to many of our listener but you know, we're seeing insurers lag behind in areas like brand experience, customer service. And, and that's been backed up by other customer experience reports we've seen from other groups over the last few months and few years. So more broadly for, for the, for the leaders listening in, what do you think that other parts of the industry, where do you think other parts of the industry are, are falling shorts and, and where do you see opportunities for improvement? Where could other companies follow the lead of, of CareFirst?
- [04:35]
B
Yeah, it's been interesting, Jacob, and talking with both folks inside of industry and outside of industry and whether it's been chief marketing officers with other companies or chief experience officers. You know, we talk about this a lot and this idea of you really got to look at what's happening in outside consumer interactions and how that's influencing experience expectations. And so I think when you see what came out from Forrester in an industry like ours, that was admittedly had a lot of opportunity in front of it many years ago as it related to, you know, the opportunities to optimize and improve things like customer member experience. You have to continue to pay attention to these outside forces. And I go back, you know, my time in the agency world, we used to talk about what happened with Google Search when autofill came in and just what, what that did for, for the consumer around being able to not have to even complete a search query to ultimately get results. And then you look certainly, you know, it would be lost without mentioning just the impact of what AI and AI type interactions are doing to consumer experience. And so I think what you're really continuing to see is this ongoing re baselining of consumer expectations and the industry not moving fast enough and already being behind that's really being a detriment to a lot of what is the customer or member experience in this case. And so you think about what things you'll see in forester studies and hear from experienced professionals. Right. This, this starts ultimately at trust. And so much of trust is tied to personal and we've seen this in our internal studies as well as the external measurement programs as to how personalization and trust move together. Right. And members or consumers really know like does the brand know who I am as really just a simple starting point of the interactions they have. And so you know, thinking about what's happening in that space and then thinking about frictionless. Right. And I think this is again two main areas that AI is really continuing to push not just in terms of what the AI technology is, how you're seeing it present itself in terms of online commerce and ordering from day to day things consumers are interacting with as well as other industries, quite frankly hospitality and the finance industry doing a lot of leading work in this space. And so you look then back at ours and you go, okay, well frictionless, where, where do we create friction? Right? And you think about things like prior auth and you're seeing the industry even now come together in 2025 and go, we've got to create some standardizations here because we're doing these things too independently at the detriment of the consumer. And so we've got to make wider swee changes there in order for that to happen. There's no doubt obviously since the events In December of 24, the stories around claim denials, right. And so these things represent friction. And I think as we think about experience today and what consumers expect, they don't care about your business processes and practices. If those need to be in place, they need to happen in the background. Right. And so simple things like single sign on, you know, and really making sure that you're creating a frictionless environment and interaction for the consumers. And so I think we're just seeing ongoing re baselining in the expectations just growing and growing from consumers on what they want. And it's incumbent on us to meet that challenge. And I think we admit that we've got a lot of opportunity in this industry with our abilities to inject this in. We have to be cautious as we think about opportunities in that space around AI and automation. But there's a lot of opportunity here that I think is going to go a long way in just helping consumers with what I think is some relatively basic expectations around being able to self serve at greater capacities in this industry and meet, you know, industry wide benchmarks and at the same time just being able to do the things they need to do to navigate the health care experience easier.
- [08:17]
A
Definitely. And it's interesting you say that the industry needs to look more externally because we've, we've heard that before from, from leaders all over the country in terms of wanting to emulate more the airline industry or what you mentioned, the hospitality industry and make things so much easier for customers. And, and one thing, one challenge we always hear is that it's just, it's such a, everyone's working in different spaces and silos and, and it's such a complex industry. It's so difficult for the better. And I think, you know, that's, I think that's a pretty fair thing to say towards someone in your role as working as a, as a Chief Marketing Officer in this space, is that it's, it's a very difficult industry. It's, it's very complex, it's very emotional from the member side of things and what we've just talked about, the customer expectations are so quickly evolving in what can be a very rigid space. So with all that being said, Mac, from your experience now at CareFirst, what do you think is key to successfully navigating all these challenges and really achieving that sustained success that we've now seen CareFirst be able to do?
- [09:20]
B
Yeah. I think first is we've got to throw that storyline out. Right. I think for too long we've existed on the idea these things are too complex. Right. And there's too much around it, whether it's regulation and product design, benefit design. And so we've got to challenge ourselves that that excuse isn't going to be tolerated anymore. And you've seen it in the startup world as things come in and try and really challenge the. And what it's often doing is nothing more than simplifying. And so, you know, one of the things culturally we've really established as we think about experience, strategy and journey mapping for our members is this idea of moments of truth. When you identify those moments of truth, how do you look at those and really challenge on what makes for a better consumer experience today than what we're offering? And so you think about, you know, when people buy products up front and this is like a very basic interaction for us, but it's something that we've really got to think about of what are we doing to educate that member in that capacity. And for so long we accepted things like providing a glossary of our own terminology as a way of educating consumers around buying. That's not good enough. Right. The fact that we even have to offer the glossary, I think should tell us something. Right. About what we're doing. But thinking about people buying, people buying for me or people buying for us. Right. Which is often happening in our world. And how do you create better education, better shopping experiences that account for that? And we've seen a big lift there just in the way in which we talk with our members or potential members during that purchase process and really trying to work now with our partners on how we scale those efforts to bring that experience to members as they purchase, knowing that that's at the very outset of our relationship, going to start things off. And then looking at those other moments of truth when people are calling in to try and estimate costs for various procedures when they receive an eob, what does that EOB look like? What is the language we use in it? And really trying to think about those pieces and adopting this idea of being simp, clear and human and challenging ourselves across the journey as to anywhere where we're not living up to that and how we might challenge those interactions to meet. That opportunity to be simple, clear and human is something we're really taking on internally in so much of what we're doing, as well as the folks that are ultimately answering the phone at the end of the day. And our folks do a phenomenal job of this. And I'd argue that so much of the success you're seeing right now is those interactions that we see from people that do have to call in and are looking for guidance and help in what can be a really vulnerable moment in their life, whether they're dealing with something health related, but also inevitably something financially related and having someone they feel like they can trust to talk to.
- [11:57]
A
Absolutely. So throwing out that old playbook of, you know, things are too complex, too rigid for change to occur. It's fascinating to hear you say that. Mac. Before we go, what else are we missing? You've got the ears of a lot of other health plan leaders from all over the country. What else do you want to share with them?
- [12:17]
B
I think that really interesting thing to me in looking at this year's results in this particular study, but something we've really been trying to look at for a while now is just the relationship and play between brand and experience. And I think we talk about this a lot. As to the brand that shows up in your respective market versus the experience your current customers have and how much daylight is there between those two things. And so I think what I'd encourage other leaders to look at, whether you look at the results of your own performance in a study like this or at least just conceptually what this third party research and a company like Forrester is showing is just how much play there is between these two places and the way you've got to really look at them together as to how experience is an extension of brand and brand is an extension of experience. And I think you've got to think about that strategy holistically and pay attention to both what your customers are telling you today in that as well as what is the market saying. And if your ultimate goal, like many, is growth and retention, certainly is looking at how are we able to engage that audience and what are the challenges ahead of us as we try and generate new growth and really understand what our challenges are in that space, what are opportunities to lean into that space, but how these things connect together. And I think this is something that marketing leaders and experienced leaders have talked about for quite some time. But there's got to be really tight connectivity between these functions if you are going to be successful as you endeavor on this journey. And I think that's a real opportunity for everybody to lean into.
- [13:48]
A
Fantastic. It's great. Last bits of advice Mac, I want to thank you for taking the time to chat with us and for sharing your insights with our listeners. We really appreciate it.
- [13:58]
B
Thanks so much for having me, Jacob. Really appreciate the opportunity.
- [14:01]
A
Yeah, absolutely. And to our listeners, if you want to listen to more podcasts from Becker's Healthcare, you can Visit Becker Hospital Review.com.