Today’s interview is with Cale Urwin, Director, Data, Digital & Marketing Health Services at Bupa. I caught up with Cale recently at PegaWorld in Las Vegas to talk about what stood for him at the event and how Bupa has evolved its customer engagement story and Customer Decision Hub capabilities in Australia from outbound to digital management and surprise & delight strategies.

This interview follows on from my recent interview – The ongoing decline of brand loyalty, what’s driving it and what should be done about it – Interview with Simon Morris of ServiceNow – and is number 510 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders who are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees.

Disclaimer: I partnered with Pega to conduct interviews and provide my perspective on PegaWorld iNspire 2024.

Here are the highlights of my chat with Cale:

• We’ve been on a multi-year journey with Pega and other vendors to uplift our customer engagement engine capability and then integrate it into our channels so that our members are experiencing one experience.
• We have an ambition to be the most customer-centric healthcare organization in the world.
• My goal and hope for customer experience and personalization for Bupa is that people who engage with healthcare have the same expectations that they would have with a telco, an airline or any other leading brand.
• You’ve got to start with a vision of where you’re going to end up. We’ve got a fantastic relationship between our business strategy and our strategic architecture.
• If your business strategy defines that we’re going to be integrating provision and a payer business model, then the target state architecture needs to see that come to life technically.
• We’ve got a really strong share of voice with our architects guiding the business around their technology investment.
• Big shout out to MJ Garcia at Bupa.
• Foundational to us achieving this was the articulation of the common experience that we wanted to deliver our Bupa members. For example, these are the capabilities, be it a push notification, an email, variable template, a call center dialer, integration, whatever it be, here are the technologies that will deliver those capabilities and here’s where our gaps are.
• While, we started with a clear view of where we wanted to end up, technology evolves so our vision is continuing to evolve today.
• However, getting clear on our vision of the end state gave us great clarity of where our problems were and where our problems are. They remain around how we curate and structure our data so that we can then execute and decision in real time.
• Data remains a huge focus for us in our target state architecture.
• Broadly speaking, we have delivered an omnichannel integration for health insurance, and now the next part and the real focus for our business strategies is connecting member experiences and care experiences for our members. For example, how do we deliver an omnichannel experience in the provisioning landscape that is either owned by Bupa but also outside of our network, which includes being able to integrate with third party systems and data.
• The greatest achievement that we’ve seen is we’ve seen double digit growth in our customer engagement.
• The number of propositions we’ve been able to serve to our members has resulted in higher levels of engagement (open rates, click-through rates, positive sentiment, NPS etc) whilst maintaining our unsubscribe rates or lowering them.
• We’ve just seen really positive engagement with our customers, and we’ve seen an NPS in our dental business group of 82%, which is great particularly in a service industry that is not universally loved.
• A tool like Pega Customer Decisioning Hub (CDH) requires an organization to have a level of gumption behind the data that they’re observing.
• There’s truth in the data, which means that you’ve got to put aside your own products and propositions if it’s in the best service of retaining and driving customer lifetime value for members.
• Trust the propensity.
• We take great pride and value in our ability to be able to observe large data sets, break that down and then drive various different scenarios that would suggest the right product for the right customer demographic at the right time.
• For example, my mother might prefer to speak to someone on the phone between three and six p.m. as opposed to my wife, who is busy with our two young boys under the age of three at that time. So, a push notification served in-app at a time that she can then consume later when the kids are sleeping, would work best.
• Another example, which I was fascinated to learn about as I have two boys that are going to be coming into this demographic later, but you know that there will be a claim spike at the age of 10 through to 13 for a teenage child, and it’ll be the point where they come into orthodontics and needing braces.
• In terms of how applying gen AI is going to help, we think that the value over a period of time could be anywhere from 20 % to 50 % in terms of being faster to market.
• Initially, our focus will be on content generation, but eventually, our focus will shift up the value chain to content data.
• You’re nevwith done on personalisation. The job’s never finished and we’ll forever be trying to stitch together these experiences for our members.
• Cale’s best advice: Surround yourself with diverse perspectives and get yourself the best team possible. You can never be specialized enough in this space. The technology is moving far too fast that any one individual will never be able to be a prophet in this space. So surround yourself with the best possible talent that you can get and make sure that it’s diverse in its perspectives because you want friction around what your target state architecture is going to be and how you’re going to get there because that’s where that performance tension comes from.

About Cale

Cale Urwin is the Director of Data, Digital, & Marketing Health Services at Bupa in Australia, based in Melbourne. He has been with Bupa for just over 6 years and, prior to that, held a number of strategy positions with Lion, Aesop and Siemens Healthineers.

Check out Bupa and Bupa in Australia, say Hi to them on X (Twitter) @Bupa and @BupaAustralia and feel free to connect with Cale on LinkedIn here.

Credit: Image by Alexa from Pixabay