Two years ago, John Ounjian, senior vice president and CIO of Blue Cross and Blue Shield (BCBS) of Minnesota, managed to convince General Mills, an $8 billion consumer goods giant, to join his regional health plan on the basis of a promise: He would soon be in-stalling a Web-based customer service system that would let subscribers manage their health benefits online. Subscribers would be able to select health plans tailored to their individual needs and wallets, calculate their own contributions to their coverage, research information on prescription drugs and other treatments, locate participating physicians, and check the status of their claims.

Selling a product that didn’t exist was the easy part. The hard part, Ounjian says, was planning and building a CRM system that would live up to the assurances he gave executives at General Mills. To implement that system, he had to install a brand-new infrastructure to integrate his Web and call center operation and to provide timely, accurate information to customers. And he had to migrate millions of bytes of data stored in back-end databases to the Web front end?massaging and reformatting the data so that consumers could understand it.

Ounjian pulled it off. As a result of the online customer self-service system his IT staff finished implementing in January 2002, BCBS of Minnesota has not only met the specifications of General Mills, but the $5 billion plan has also managed to beat national providers Aetna, Cigna and Humana out of several very large accounts such as 3M, Northwest Airlines and Target.

Ounjian says his company’s membership grew by 10 percent, or 200,000 new members, in 2002, largely because of its online customer self-service system. Even more remarkable, BCBS of Minnesota experienced that growth in membership at a time when several national insurers lost millions of members. Cigna, for instance, lost 10 percent of its membership in 2002 due in part to a botched customer self-service system implementation. (See "Cigna’s Self-Inflicted Wounds" at www.cio.com/printlinks.)

"We all have to have this capability; that’s not what’s going to differentiate us," Ounjian says. "It’s how you execute these functions, how you bring the customer on board that makes all the difference."

Doing It Right

There isn’t an industry better suited to online customer self-service than health insurance, which can intimidate and confuse even the savviest consumer. What patient wouldn’t forgo her provider’s cumbersome toll-free number?with its long hold times?in favor of a Web-based solution that allows her 24/7 access to all kinds of health-care answers?