Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan's "Customer Experience Room" wins award for innovation from international association

DETROIT, May 20, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- A 300-square-foot mobile, interactive room created by Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan to help its employees "walk in the shoes" of health insurance customers received the 2013 CX Innovation Award from the Customer Experience Professionals Association (CXPA).

The CXPA is an international non-profit organization created to guide and enhance the growing professional field of customer experience management. The CX Innovation Awards recognize new practices that improve customer experience, result in strong business impact and advance the field of customer experience for other organizations.

"The Michigan Blues are honored to be recognized for our continuous effort to make our customers' experience easy, useful and enjoyable," said Kathryn Levine, BCBSM vice president for corporate marketing and customer experience.  "Health insurance is undergoing a radical transformation into a consumer-driven industry.  To succeed, health insurers must be attuned to the expectations of people, make their coverage easy to understand and solve problems well.  We developed our customer experience room to reflect the real hopes and headaches people in Michigan have with their health insurance.  We took it on the road, visiting 10 Blues' locations in 90 days to interact with thousands of our employees."

The BCBSM Customer Experience Room helps the Blues' nearly 7,000 employees better understand and empathize with customer pain points about health insurance, and fosters enterprise-wide employee engagement in improving the customer experience. The mobile, interactive room offers an immersive learning environment through a series of exercises designed to meet a variety of learning styles. Using self-guided navigation, employees walk through the experiences of three customer "personas," crafted after extensive research by the company.  Employees see how customer experience initiatives undertaken by the company connect with how Blues customers want their experience to be.

Levine will be one of four panelists on May 30 at 7 a.m. during a Detroit Regional Chamber Mackinac Policy Conference presentation on customer experience at Grand Hotel on Mackinac Island.  The panel presentation will discuss how health insurers are changing to meet the demands of consumers, and why the customer experience matters to companies in all industries.

About the CXPA
The Customer Experience Professionals Association is a global non-profit organization dedicated to the advancement of customer experience management best practices. It provides customer experience management professionals with educational and networking opportunities to help them succeed, and facilitates the industry-wide advancement of the discipline of customer experience management. The CXPA's members include individuals who develop, manage, optimize, and envision how organizations interact with their customers. This community includes customer experience practitioners within companies, vendors who support customer experience efforts, and other stakeholders in the industry.  Founded in April 2011, the CXPA has more than 75 Corporate Members and 2200 customer experience professionals in its community. CXPA Gold Sponsors include Confirmit, ForeSee, SAP America, Inc., Oracle, Vivisimo, and Vovici, a Verint Systems Company. Achieve Global, Clarabridge, Inc., Corsential, Interactive Intelligence, Mattersight Corporation, Medallia, ResponseTek and TNS are CXPA Silver Sponsors. For more information, visit www.cxpa.org.

About Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan
Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan, a nonprofit organization, provides and administers health benefits to more than 4.4 million members residing in Michigan in addition to members of Michigan-headquartered groups who reside outside the state. Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan and Blue Care Network are nonprofit corporations and independent licensees of the Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association. For more company information, visit http://www.bcbsm.com.

SOURCE Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan