Medibank pilots Salesforce's customer data platform

Medibank is piloting Salesforce’s customer data platform technology as part of a broader transformation of the way it interacts with members.

The private health insurer has used Salesforce technology for the past decade, though usage had “accelerated” in recent years as the company adopted Salesforce’s Marketing Cloud to make member experiences more personalised.

“I think the biggest challenge we have today is how we maintain relevance to our members in a really highly competitive environment, while focusing on their health needs,” automation and audience manager Jonathan Goh told Salesforce’s Australian World Tour conference.

“From this, a few key themes emerge. How do we maintain strong product differentiation across our brands, Medibank and ahm?

“How do we build out a dynamic marketing data strategy to enable enterprise agility and achieve deep insights on our customers? 

“And finally, how do we use our current technology and capability stack to deliver a real one-to-one health experience for our members?”

Medibank indicated it had transformed member experiences already by using various capabilities within Marketing Cloud such as Social Studio, Advertising Studio and Audience Studio.

It used Social Studio to detect questions asked by customers on social media channels and to triage and direct them internally in real-time for the fastest response.

Audience Studio enabled the insurer to tailor communications to a customer based on their circumstances at a particular time.

This, for example, meant that if a customer had an open service case, their customer record would be automatically added to an advertising exclusion list until their case was resolved. 

Advertising Studio, meanwhile, was being used to optimise the company’s online media spend.

Goh said that Medibank would continue to focus on improving member experiences in the immediate future. 

“We are honing in on that one-to-one experience to ensure our members get the right experience at the right time, and the relevant experience more importantly,” he said.

Several packages of technology works would be required to continue that effort.

“I think the first off the rank is cross-platform integration. We have a lot of martech assets, [which] we'd like to integrate ... to deliver better personalisation,” Goh said.

“The second thing - and the one I'm most excited about - is the CDP [customer data platform] technology and how we manage real-time decisioning.

“We are currently participating in the Salesforce CDP pilot, which is really helping us evaluate how we can incorporate this technology into our technology stack.”

CDPs are used to create unified customer profiles by stitching together identities and associated data spread across different platforms.

“In a nutshell, CDPs are concerned with these primary tasks: data collection, data unification, data activation, and data insights,” according to Salesforce documentation.

“Once the CDP has created unified profiles of customers, the system has to make that data available in real time so companies can deliver personalised experiences.”

Salesforce’s CDP play is contained within a tool called Customer 360. 

The vendor started piloting a “next-generation” version in the latter part of 2019; even deeper capabilities are likely in the future after Salesforce snapped up CDP vendor Evergage last month.

Goh said that Medibank would also continue to work on integrating sales and service to “engineer an omnichannel experience” for customers, so they “get the most relevant experience no matter what channel they choose.”

Additionally, Goh said Medibank is “in the process of reviewing our platform architecture with the Salesforce team to work hand-in-hand to identify where opportunities exist to either consolidate or grow our capability in this area.”