The Marketing team at Blue Cross Blue Shield NC sought to improve its members health outcomes through better engagement and experiences. Various solutions had been tried in the past without improvement and the path to getting better was still unclear and constrained by internal obstacles.

Partnering with leadership, we believed better outcomes would only come from better decisions, actions and behaviors. The approach toward improvement we developed was grounded in agile marketing and had two key components.

The first was to instill an agile mindset by building and coaching a cross-functional team to put the member at the center of all decisions and work. This outside-in approach enabled the team to change their perspective, crash silos, and address the root causes of low customer engagement.‍

The second was to establish an agile way of working by adopting 2-week sprints to establish and maintain focus on key priorities. This provided a pathway to better outcomes by putting attention on the enterprise wide issues that had led to long marketing program development times. 

In just its first three months, the team made a demonstrable impact across key categories:

• ‍Marketing Effectiveness: key engagement measures on marketing efforts improved +8% in email open rate, +89% in enrollment starts, substantially moving members through their enrollment journey.

• ‍Marketing Efficiency: Overall program development time decreased by 42%; the largest improvement being days spent in the review cycle. The team was able to cut 30 days from that process, significantly decreasing wasted time and increasing efficiency.

• ‍Team Culture: Dramatic increase in key team attributes: +66% in clarity, +97% in innovation, +152% in transparency; allowing for more valuable work within the team and beyond to the larger organization.

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