Dedicated to Discovering How People Make Choices
Denis Mrkva, General Manager, HealthSpire, recently visited MECLABS Institute (parent research organization of MarketingSherpa and creator of our free digital marketing course), and we had the opportunity to interview him about an interesting landing page experiment that was in progress at the time. Denis also shared what happened after the landing page — namely, how after employing this powerful and effective marketing strategy he now staffs and runs a call center that truly provides value to customers.
Test Your Knowledge
Before you read or watch the full case study, it’s important to get in the right frame of mind. Which landing page do you think will perform better? And why? Think about that, then continue on to the case study to better understand your own assumptions and learn what the data showed. Perhaps you’ll discover a new paradigm to take your marketing to the next level.
Here, we offer an abbreviated 5-minute version of the video interview. Or you can watch the full 21-minute version. But if you prefer to read instead of watch, you can read the full transcript of the conversation below the article. Jump to full transcript.
SHORT 5-MINUTE VIDEO:
FULL 21-MINUTE VIDEO:
HealthSpire is a subsidiary of Aetna, a $63 billion managed health care company founded in 1853. HealthSpire serves Americans 65 and over with Medicare, Medicare Advantage and Medicare Supplement insurance plans. It also offers ancillary products for dental, vision, cancer, heart attack and stroke.
HealthSpire also serves two other groups with its marketing — individuals who have yet to turn 65 but are beginning to research Medicare products and children or caregivers of people who are or will soon be eligible for Medicare.
CHALLENGE
About 18 months ago, HealthSpire created a landing page to get potential customers to learn more about Medicare through a phone or chat conversation and, ultimately, register for Medicare plans.
Creative Sample #1: Original landing page
“Our hypothesis was that we want to have something that's short and not confusing. What we were afraid of was that more information will create more confusion, resulting in a negative outcome. So we decided to go with a first control version, simple, just outlining products we have without going in depth. And giving them a chance to contact us via phone, schedule a call or chat with us,” said Denis Mrkva, General Manager, HealthSpire.
However, a few months after launching the page, Mrkva’s team realized that it wasn’t working.
And then, I was fortunate to be referenced to MECLABS [Institute] and Flint [McGlaughlin] by my manager. And when we started talking to MECLABS, the lights went on. A light bulb went on. — Denis Mrkva
"I realized that this discipline that MECLABS has in actually understanding the relevant content, understanding the audience that we want to service, understanding the products, is the way to go,” Mrkva said.
“So we engaged with MECLABS to create a new set of landing pages that are actually focused on how a consumer would like to interact with us, and especially they’re very targeted [to] consumer segments who may not be that digitally savvy,” he explained.
[Partner with MECLABS Institute to drive growth in your organization]
The team analyzed the current HealthSpire landing page and identified a problem: It had a lack of credibility hurting its primary-, process-, and product-level value propositions required to build trust with potential customers and create a perceived value in speaking with a HealthSpire agent.
After all, most customers are not excited about getting on the phone with an agent or a sales rep. They must first understand the value of that conversation to overcome the anxiety of a sales call, in addition to the time and effort they would invest in such a conversation.
CAMPAIGN
Based on that analysis, the team created the following research question:
Will the addition of primary and product-level value, coupled with the emphasis of value on a “Trusted Advisor,” drive additional calls?
And based on that, they created the hypothesis: By providing emphasis on the trusted advisor value rather than overwhelming prospects with the various Medicare products and plans options, we will generate more leads and requests for calls than the control.
From that hypothesis, they designed two treatment landing pages and launched an experiment.
Creative Sample #2: Treatment 1 — long page
Creative Sample #3: Treatment 2 — Short page
RESULTS
Denis visited in the middle of the experiment, and the results we discussed in the video were intermediate results before the experiment closed. The final results also showed that the longer landing page performed better, generating 638% more leads.
Value of longer landing page outweighs its friction
Visitors (valid leads only) who saw the longer page — which included more HealthSpire/agent value copy and imagery — were more likely to call than those who saw the simpler page with less content about the agents and HealthSpire values.
In other words, the additional value presented in the longer page outweighed the additional friction from having a longer page.
Humanizing the brand added appeal and visualizing the agents reduced anxiety
Knowing that they were going to be speaking with a friendly agent may have helped them visualize how the conversation would be and reduced their anxiety.
Creative Sample #4: TeleAgent Tip from winning landing page treatment
What we found out by working with MECLABS and testing things is that, at the end of the day, what we are asking somebody to do is call us and talk to a person. — Denis Mkrva
“So having actually the person or the people who the customers will be talking to on the site, and actually having the opportunity to get to know the agents before they call, and provide the content that will actually create a relationship between the customer and the agent on the site even before they call us, are some of the reasons why we believe that Treatment 1 is doing a lot better.”
Creative Sample #5: Q&A with TeleAgent from winning landing page treatment
It all begins with creating real value for the customer
The longer landing page worked because it did a better job of increasing the perceived value of contacting a TeleAgent. However, for this strategy to work, Mrkva first made sure to create real value in interacting with the TeleAgents, that could then be communicated on the landing page.
“Part of that value is the people we employ. If you think about the agents that work for HealthSpire, all of our agents are college graduates,” Mkrva said. “The question became, how can we create a call center culture that becomes a value proposition for the college graduates?”
One way Mrkva’s team creates the value proposition for college graduates is by creating an environment the employees can thrive in. For example, they balance time on the phone with time reflecting on what they learned from previous calls — to help understand the psychology behind conversations they previously had and optimize future conversations. Understanding the people they’re talking to, not just the products they’re selling and a script they’re reading.
"It is perhaps the hardest sale you can make.What you're trying to do is, in real time without looking at the person, persuade the person that if you have the right product for them and their needs, this is the right thing to do and to make a decision that will be very impactful on their well-being and financial health of their household budget," Mrkva said.
A customer-first marketing approach
Not only is there value for customers who call into HealthSpire because the TeleAgents are well educated, but value also comes from the type of people the company hires and the customer-first philosophy behind the advice these agents offer on the calls.
“What we look for is — and it's not easy, it's not easy to evaluate people in an interview — is integrity. You have to do the right thing,” Mrkva said.
“We're trying to find the right solution for the customer. And if there is no right solution for the customer with us, we will not sell." — Denis Mrkva
"Actually, we'll recommend either stay with what you have, or maybe you should go and call other providers that have a product, because we can help them find the better product. Even though we cannot sell to them, we can tell them there is … company X [that] has this product, so you may want to go to this site,” he said.
This approach helps with employee satisfaction and engagement as well.
“It's human nature. Our nature is to help somebody. So we need to enable people to be people in the workplace,” Mrkva said. “If you have the right people and if you make them happy and content, our customers will be happy and content.”
Source
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Full Transcript of Video Interview
Daniel Burstein: In our marketing, we have a lot of assumptions about what we think will work. We have that golden gut. One of those assumptions is, long form doesn't work. People want short, they want quick. They want quippy. Well, that's why you’ve got to test and experiment and see what works. And we're going to look at an experiment today that challenges that model.
Hi, I'm Daniel Burstein. I'm the Senior Director of Content at Marketing and MECLABS Institute. And I'm joined by Denis Mrkva, the General Manager of HealthSpire, a subsidiary of Aetna. Thanks for joining us, Denis.
Denis Mkrva: Thank you for having me.
Daniel: So, here we're going to look at an experiment that your team ran with MECLABS Institute. So let's just start, pull it up on the screen, and we've got the control and Treatment 1 and Treatment 2. Let's just start by telling us about HealthSpire briefly. Who are they? How does HealthSpire serve a customer?
Denis: Well, HealthSpire is an Aetna subsidiary. And as such, we offer a portfolio of Medicare products for the seniors in the country that are eligible to purchase Medicare, Medicare Advantage, Medicare Supplement, as well as ancillary products such as dental and vision, cancer, heart attack and stroke. Really we’re trying to protect as much as we can and enable people to have that protection holistically for their health.
Daniel: Okay. And so when we look at this landing page, what was the goal of the landing page?
Denis: Well, the goal of the landing page, if you look at the first, the control version, that's when HealthSpire started a year and a half ago. And as you said, we all want things to be shorter, cleaner and to the point. Unfortunately, when you deal with very complex products in an industry such as healthcare, it is not that easy to do.
However, a year and a half ago when we started HealthSpire, the assumption was, or hypothesis was, that we want to have something that's short and not confusing. What we were afraid of was that more information would create more confusion, more friction, hence, resulting in a negative outcome. So we decided to go with a first control version, simple, just outlining products we have without going in depth. And giving them a chance to contact us via phone, schedule a call or chat with us.
Daniel: Let's take a look at it. So what were you trying to do with these two treatments?
Denis: Okay, then a few months after starting up that page, we realized it's not working. We realized something is going on. And then I was fortunate to be referenced to MECLABS and Flint by my manager. And when we started talking to MECLABS, the lights went on. A light bulb went on. I realized that this discipline that MECLABS has in actually understanding the relevant content, understanding the audience that we want to service, understanding the products, is the way to go.
So we engaged with MECLABS to create a new set of landing pages that are actually focused on how a consumer would like to interact with us and especially {inaudible} very targeted consumer segments who may not be that digitally savvy. And so we started working on a few different prototypes.
Again, we wanted to have something that has a bit more information, it's more informative, but give two different looks and feels. One would be with a lot more information, in depth. Another one with less information, that would really service almost as a passthrough to people who have already done their research. And then we launched.
Daniel: Yeah. So now you can see, if you're watching too, look at the short versus the long. And think about that for a second. I think most people would assume, you can see how much longer that page is, short is going to work better. It's quick, everything is right there, people don't want to read through things that are long. Let's take a quick look at the results.
So now let me mention these results. They're pretty astounding. We're still in the middle of this experiment. Denis just happens to be joining us at our headquarters in Jacksonville, Florida, here. So that's why we're discussing it now. The results aren't complete yet. But look at those early numbers. That's pretty astounding of how well the long form is doing.
Denis: It's doing great, actually. And what we found out by working with MECLABS and testing things is that, at the end of the day, what we are asking somebody to do is call us and talk to a person. So having actually the person or the people that the customers will be talking to on the site, and actually having the opportunity to get to know the agents before they call, and providing the content that will actually create a relationship between the customer and the agent on the site even before they call us, are some of the reasons why we believe that Treatment 1 is doing a lot better.
Daniel: I think what you're doing there is a process level value proposition. Right?
Denis: Yes.
Daniel: You're not trying to sell all of HealthSpire, all of your entire product. All you're trying to do is get someone to make a call. And that could be a reason why the long form works better because who among us is like, "Yes, I want to get on a call with someone to sell me. That's what I want to do. Let me grab that phone number right now." No. You have to sell them on the value of the call, right?
Denis: Yes. And the part of that value is the people we employ. If you think about the agents that work for HealthSpire, all of our agents are college graduates. We believe that since the product itself and the industry is actually very complex compared to some other industries I worked in, such as consumer finance or the P&C insurance industry — it is heavily regulated, it has a diverse set of products and plans, and to actually understand that, we do want to employ people who have cognitive skills. And I think a certificate of having cognitive skills in the country is having a college degree.
So we wanted to really try to figure out how do we — and I ran analytics for some time in my previous career where we had always an opportunity to hire people with a high level of education — the question became, “How can we create a call center culture that becomes a value proposition for the college graduates who just spent maybe $40,000 or $50,000 on their education, and now we're asking them to be on the phone?” It wouldn't be appealing to me at all.
And then also, inform our customers that in order for us to service them, it has to start with our employees first, how we train them, how we treat them, how we work with them, how we develop them. And that connection that's being done on the digital landing page or the longer version is showing results. It's working.
Daniel: If we take a look deeper into the results of conversions, we see there's also more conversions for the longer page. It's clear, you're not just getting more people, you're getting probably better leads. But also, what you're doing on the call center side is working.
So let me ask you about that because we recently did a case study with The Globe and Mail, a large Canadian newspaper, and they have a call center there. And what they were telling me is, the real challenge is, (you probably have a bigger challenge than this) is there is such high turnover in call centers that they don't really get people who understand the product enough. Right? So what they had to do is create this messaging guide and really give them all the information necessary to even someone who’s only there a short time to understand the product.
It's interesting what you talk about. You have even a bigger challenge. Understanding a newspaper is one thing. Understanding a complex product that you probably yourself don't use because you're not a senior citizen, is more difficult. So what are some of your tactics to, one, reduce turnover and create a working environment that's amenable, and two, to educate them so they can help educate their customers and really understand the product?
Denis: Well, that's interesting because let's suppose that we are running a basketball team. That's our business, and as a coach and general manager, we show up for a game and we realize that our players don't know how to play the game. Whose fault is that? It's the coach and the manager’s. So the very first thing that we realized is that in order for people to do their jobs, we not only need to find the right talent and onboard that, but we need to continuously work on coaching them day in and day out.
And through the process, the hardest part is how do you find a balance between them doing their job and having enough time to develop them into effective employees. But not only at a professional level, how do you help them personally develop themselves and get them ready for some other jobs within the company or outside the company? So very quickly we realized it all comes down to culture and environment.
What I mean by that is that, see, when we ask somebody to be on the phone 9 or 10 hours, it's humanly impossible to be focused on talking to customer after customer without having the ability to actually take some time off and reflect on, “What was I talking about in the last call that made me do well versus now?”
Then we need to enable them to start learning about the fact that talking on the phone with somebody is perhaps the hardest sale you can make, and it has a lot to do with the psychology of people rather than just learning the product. Because what you're trying to do is, in real time without looking at the person, persuade the person that if you have the right product for them and their needs with that, this is the right thing to do and to make a decision that will be very impactful on their well-being and financial health of their household budget.
Now to do that you also need to take out product knowledge, you need to start helping them to understand the importance of listening, importance of being able to lead people in the conversation through certain decision-making that you have to do on their behalf. So very quickly we realized it's not only about knowing the product and having a script that you can read, it's about exploring behind, what's behind a sale. On the phone, it has to do with the psychology of people and ability of people to adjust their approach to the customer given the differences they have listened to on the phone.
Daniel: It sounds like empathy.
Denis: It is.
Daniel: Is that something that you look for when you're hiring? Empathy?
Denis: What we look for is — and it's not easy, it's not easy to evaluate people in an interview — is integrity. You have to do the right thing. And what are we doing here? We're trying to find the right solution for the customer. And if there is no right solution for the customer with us, we will not sell.
Actually, we'll recommend. Either stay with us or maybe you should go and call other providers that have a product — because we can help them find the better product. Even though we cannot sell to them, we can tell them, “Company X has this product, so you may want to go to this site.”
Daniel: So that's very interesting. I don't want to lose that point because I assume you're investing significant amounts to just get these calls, to begin with, on the landing page. And each call is valuable to you. So you're saying that you train your call center employees when you don't have the right product for them, to find the right product for them, wherever it's from, to point them in another direction.
Denis: Indeed.
Daniel: That's outstanding.
Denis: That's I think, if you think about HealthSpire, as I said, is a subsidiary of Aetna. Aetna has been in existence for more than 160 years. And if you take a look at our competition, perhaps the one that's the second oldest one is most likely a hundred years younger than us. There's a reason why Aetna survived all those decades or century and a half, more than a century and a half, and that's the ability not only to anticipate change that is coming but actually to be around people who believe that our job is, our fiduciary responsibility is, to make money for our shareholders and to maximize that. But the way, how we achieve that is the right way. And when you put these two together I think you maximize both. You maximize the financial performance of the company and you maximize an employee satisfaction engagement that then allows you to sustain the business model.
Daniel: It's more fulfilling to employees to really serve the customer even when they're not selling their own product, it sounds like.
Denis: It's human nature. I'd be surprised if you, maybe not every one of us, but if you take us in general, our nature is to help somebody. Would you agree?
Daniel: Totally.
Denis: So we need to enable people to be people in the workplace.
Daniel: Let me ask you about that because enabling people to be people in the workplace, that could be a challenging call center. So I wonder how you monitor individual performance. Because a lot of what you're talking about would go against the metrics we see in a lot of other call centers. It's about the amount of calls they can make in a day or getting off the phone quickly, some of these things. It almost seems like a factory production. So how do you monitor individual performance and allow people to be people in a call center?
Denis: It's interesting you said that because before taking this position about 18 months ago, I never ran a business, a startup. I was in the area of analytics my entire career. It's a function of support which you contribute, but it's really not directly responsible for the performance of the business. And when I started learning about this, when I started my job, I reached out to people to see how other people do that. It's new to me.
I started thinking about things such as average handling time, minimizing average handling time. And I was thinking, and I realized, “No, I want to maximize the average handling time, given the maximum productivity.” In other words, we don't monitor average handling time. With our agents, we have goals, what we need to sell, and then we have a very strict process on how we sell.
That process ensures that we stay in compliance with the federal as well as state regulations because some products are regulated by the federal government, some by state. The process in which we ensure that going from introducing yourself to sale is not two minutes because in two minutes you cannot understand consumer needs. And even if they call you with a specific, preconceived notion of what they want to buy, we still want you to understand their needs because given how complex the industry is, many people actually need more education.
So it's easy to us. We employ people to sell but do it in a way that we want it to be done, which is actually serving that customer. And that's what we monitor. We monitor productivity and quality. How many calls you took, how much time spent, if you sold two policies today and that's your goal, you're going to go home. You go home.
You have to allow people, give people goals, enable them with the support they have and make sure that you hire people who are accountable. And accountability comes down to making sure that one does his or her job. Part of that is not how long we talk on the phone, how many calls. It's actually how you're doing the right thing and how we're meeting our goals.
Daniel: And it sounds like diverging from the script when it's necessary?
Denis: Yeah, because the script guides you through the framework of sales. What I mean by that is, often if you call somebody to buy insurance products, most likely they sell only one product. And when you sell only one product, you don't want to know the consumer needs. Because if the needs tell you they need product B, which you don't sell, guess what? You don't have to sell. So you're pitching the product you have.
Now we have every product that's out there. So a script allows them to systematically go through the process. And that's important because most of our people that work for HealthSpire, including myself, we don't have sales experience. And after a while, you see that the agents start not only memorizing, it becomes very natural for them, but we still let them be them.
Their personalities have to come to the phone. The way they assess the situations come to the phone. It cannot be a robot talking on the other end of the phone and reading word for word, which in some cases you have to do when you get to the certain regulated things. But in the process of assessing the needs, selling, we want them to be themselves.
Daniel: Yeah, if you want people to be robots you could just use AI at this point, right? You bring that humanity and their personality into it, sounds like?
Denis: You have to because the difference between buying a retail item, piece of clothing, and buying insurance is different. We're talking about, what I would say, is this emotional purchase, "I like this jacket. I want this jacket. Do I have enough money? That's the only thing I need to know. Do I like it? Do I have enough money? Then I'm going to buy it."
Health insurance is a rational decision. And in that rational decision given the complexity, it's good to have another human being thinking with you through what the implications are, what my options are. “How do I choose between these options?” And even though I do believe in numbers and technology, I don't think AI can get us that at this point in time. Even then, you'll still need to have some human aspect in the process.
Daniel: Absolutely. Let me ask you lastly. You mentioned Aetna is a 160-year-old company. HealthSpire is a startup within that company.
Denis: Yes.
Daniel: So what have you learned from that from maybe learning the best from an established enterprise company and learning the best from startup culture?
Denis: If you think about Aetna and HealthSpire, its relationship between Aetna investing in HealthSpire and taking a risk to invest in a different business model that doesn't exist today. Well, at least doesn't exist at the large scale. So what I learned is that as in any startup it really takes a few things.
The first becomes, “Are there people who are willing to invest, that have a vision of where they want to go?” I was lucky enough to be part of the company that has senior leadership who realized that the market is changing, the consumer demographics are changing, the profile of people that we employ is changing. So we need to learn this. And secondly, a person that wants that job has to have a vision that's aligned with the overall vision of people that are willing to invest. You have to have a certain level of courage to try things that are not tried before.
And most importantly, you have to surround yourself with people who have similar traits. People who are curious. People who are not afraid of challenges. People who are willing to sacrifice their time when the time comes to make things work. And most importantly, people understand that the success of their organization is not in having the products or the processes; It's actually having the people on the team. If you have the right people and if you make them happy and content, our customers will be happy and content.
Daniel: Excellent. All right. Well, thank you very much, Denis.
Denis: You're very, very welcome.
Daniel: Thank you for sharing this test, and I hope you enjoyed this experiment and learning a little more about call center optimization.
