Introduction
On this page
Medibank is focused on providing proactive and personalised communications to drive greater customer engagement.
During the year we enhanced the ways in which we provide options for digital engagement and launched a loyalty program to recognise and reward long-term customers. Supporting the health and wellbeing of customers remained front and centre and we invested in new initiatives to expand the breadth and reach of our health services.
Value
Medibank has committed to give back around $35 million in additional value to customers through our one-off loyalty bonus, 100% dental give back, and via the Medibank Health Concierge and Medibank at Home programs.
In addition, during the year we removed the two month waiting period for psychology services on current extras products for both Medibank and ahm in April 2018 to help customers in need of urgent mental health support. This was on top of delivering the regulatory change to provide customers with improved access to in-hospital mental health services without serving a waiting period.
The value of providing Medibank and ahm customers with faster access to psychology services was reflected in higher clinical psychology claims by people joining or upgrading their cover in the last three months of the financial year, compared to the same period last year.
Medibank was awarded Canstar ‘Outstanding Value Insurance’ for the 10th year in a row
Medibank and ahm products were recognised by Choice in its 2018 review of hospital insurance, with Medibank Core Hospital recommended within its category in every state. Core Hospital and Complete Hospital remained Medibank’s most popular hospital products during the year, while ahm’s newest products (white boost, black+white boost flexi and black+white boost) resonated with younger customers.
New trials to support customers
We commenced paying benefits towards Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS) for eligible customers via a 12 month trial that commenced in August 2018.
TMS uses magnetic pulses to stimulate areas of the brain involved in mood regulation and has been found effective in patients with depression resistant to other forms of treatment. We also began funding a 12 month trial in March 2018 to support customers with the cost of cooling cap treatments. These caps are worn during a course of in-patient chemotherapy to prevent hair loss, which can be a distressing side effect of the treatment.
Recognising loyal customers
We launched the Medibank Priority program in February 2018 for customers who have been members for 10 years or more. Priority customers have access to benefits such as a dedicated service line, support from health professionals when they go to hospital, and exclusive offers.
Loyalty bonus
We commenced a $20 million give back to Priority customers in June 2018, which we expect to run through until calendar year end. Rewards include physiotherapy, chiropractic and remedial massage services, and increased extras limits.
Helping customers use their cover
During the year we:
• Sent 3.3 million activity statements to Medibank customers opted in to receiving email to let them know the benefits we paid to them and the annual limits they have left. This was up from 1.1 million last year.
• Improved the Find a Provider functionality on our website to make it easier for customers to find a healthcare provider.
• Enabled the dynamic display of limits online and via My Medibank for 98% of our products, giving customers easy sight of the amount left on limits and waiting periods.
• Launched ahm’s first app and materially increased the speed of claiming on the Medibank app.
Experience & service
Net Promoter Score
Our Service NPS continued to improve across both brands and for our Brand NPS we recorded an improvement of around 20% in our gap to peers over the year. Our gap to peers improved every quarter compared with the same periods last year, with strong improvement in the June quarter.
Complaints and disputes in the 2018 financial year
| Complaints | |
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Disputes*
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Medibank and ahm’s share of industry complaints to the Private Health Insurance Ombudsman continued to trend below our market share during the year. This is in line with our customer milestone objective set in November 2016 by our leadership team and Board. From a 60.7% high in the September 2016 quarter, our share of industry complaints was 25.2% in the June 2018 quarter.
Our progress in driving down complaints has been the result of introducing an effective internal complaint escalation process for both the Medibank and ahm brands, focusing on proactively resolving customer issues and ensuring our teams have the right tools and training to better support our customers’ needs
Customer obsessed program
Medibank’s customer obsessed program provides opportunities for our non-customer facing employees to engage directly with customers and connect with customer-facing teams. This ensures that employees throughout our entire company understand customer needs and that they keep them at the centre of our decision making.
Activity
| Conversations with our customers | 765 employees over 16 immersion sessions |
| Listening to our customers with our Customer Connect teams | 400 employees |
| Calling our customers to say thank you | 2,430+ employees called 4,580+ customers |
| Supporting our customers in store during peak times | 200+ employees |
The value of our customer obsessed program was strongly reflected in Medibank’s employee engagement survey, with the proportion of employees agreeing that we are ‘truly customer oriented’ (82) seven percentage points above the Australian national norm. Our latest Employee Net Promoter Score (ENPS) survey results in July 2018 reflect significant improvement in our employees’ likelihood to recommend our products and services (+31), 35 points higher than the baseline measurement in November 2016 and 14 points higher than the Australian norm.
Medibank won the Wayne Cascio Organisational Change & Development Award for our customer obsessed program at the 2017 Australian Human Resources Institute (AHRI) awards
Service snapshot
| Improved 28% | Average speed of answer in our customer service centre |
| ↑131% | Increase in customer webchats |
| Launched | ahm webchat on mobile devices |
| 390,000 | Customer check-ins |
| ↑40% | Increase in customers registered to use My Medibank, with 55% of Medibank customers registered at 30 June 2018 |
| 4 x faster to 5 seconds | Improvement in average My Medibank log in load time |
| ahm app | Launched in May 2018 |
| WeChat channel | Launched in November 2017 to connect with the Chinese-speaking community |
Note: Refers to Medibank brand unless otherwise indicated.
Health & wellbeing
Health advice
During the year we invested in new ways to support the health of our customers, including a range of new initiatives to connect them with our nurses and other health professionals on the phone, online and in stores.
Nurse and other health professionals supporting customers
| Initiative | Support | Customers | Program status as at 30 June 2018 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Health Advice Line | Providing 24/7 telephone health advice | Customers with hospital cover | Ongoing |
| Customer health champions | Connecting customers to Medibank programs and services, local health support and free community-based events | Customers with high healthcare needs in selected locations | Ongoing |
| Nurses in our customer service centre | Assisting customer-facing teams in real-time to have meaningful health conversations with customers | Customer-facing teams | Trial underway |
| Nurse webchat | Providing online health advice Monday to Friday from 4pm to 10pm AEST | Customers with hospital cover | Trial underway |
| Nurse cover reviews | Contacting customers to discuss customers’ individual health needs | Customers with high healthcare needs | Trial underway |
Medibank’s Live Better platform continued to provide Australians with health and wellbeing information and expert advice.
| 100,000 | 35,000 | 725 |
|---|---|---|
| Weekly emails to site subscribers | Number of new Live Better weekly subscribers | Number of articles and pages published |
Support for growing families
Medibank’s Live Better Families Hub is supporting growing families achieve better health. Launched in May 2018, the hub features more than 100 articles, tools like the Healthy Weight Gain during Pregnancy Calculator and an email program for pregnant women that delivers information about their pregnancy journey each week.
Medibank Better Health Index
Medibank continued to deliver one of Australia’s most comprehensive quarterly health surveys.
Interviewing around 1,000 Australians each week, the Medibank Better Health Index provides an in-depth look at the nation’s health. Topics during the year included sleep apnoea in children, obesity, joint health and arthritis, and mental health conditions including anxiety, stress and depression.