Case Study: How HCF reengaged its customers through data and analytics

Australian health insurance fund HCF is embracing data and analytics to attract new and old customers to its platform.

Amit Dhagat, head of data, AI and machine learning services at HCF discusses with Digital Nation how they have brought in new customers after facing challenges around affordability and value in the industry.

Dhagat said the industry is facing a lot of challenges such as a decline in engagement.

He explained, “What that means is about 50 percent of the Australian population don't have private health cover. They've got an ageing population, and there is a reduction in uptake with the younger cohort.”

That gives Dhagat and his team an opportunity to focus on a strategy where the data is the centrepiece for all the business engagement initiatives.

“We worked on a data strategy for data analytics and BI and looked at some of the core capabilities for the foundations. So how do we engage ourselves and make sure that we have fit-for-purpose technology underpinning those capabilities, which provides us with the scale and agility that is required,” he said.

Dhagat said they didn't have a formalised data governance at HCF, so they enabled that to make the right decisions across their capabilities.

“For any successful data strategy to be formulated, you need to engage everyone across the organisation, take them on that journey and review all the artefacts,” he said.

“What we did was reviewing it more from a customer journey point of view, where you try and understand what are the pain points, what is the success criteria, how does that look like and how do we transition ourselves from tactical to strategic.

"Reviewing all the use cases, then looking at what that means to implement a strong foundation, where it can be easily scaled to meet those changing business requirements or emerging needs," he added. 

Dhagat said HCF looked at Talend as it gave the insurer the ability to integrate systems.

He said, “We had a cloud-first and cloud-agnostic vision, it brings us that agility to tap into any of those clouds be Azure or Microsoft. It provided us with a centralised ecosystem that can be trusted, which is governed, and it brings in agility for the business to utilise that information.

“When it gets time to market, improve trust within the datasets, and enabling the business to do certain self-service boarding that gave them the centralised ecosystem.”

That information has been used to solve more complex business use cases, according to Dhagat.

“Data being the centrepiece it was not only meant for utilisation within the reporting or analytics function, but we also created near real-time streams.

"Providing those insights back to the core systems where the frontline staff could use that information to make certain decisions or provide additional services to the members and it improves overall member experience,” he added.