Human-centered Design and the Sales Pitch
My Real-life Connection to (Almost) Every Supplemental Product
By Christin Kuretich
NewsDirect, October 2021
Data is king.
Isn’t that the refrain these days? And it’s hard to argue with it. We have the ability to consume data and analyze data and drill-down on data to a level that’s almost bananas. When it comes to consumer data, technology gives us access to people like never before. We measure everything, and we can quickly take snapshots of people’s opinions on any subject. We are especially rich in data when it comes to insurance. The sheer amount of data available to inform decisions about—virtually anything—is unprecedented and will likely only grow larger in the future.
With all these data points, it can be easy to miss the stories underneath. I did some in-depth interviews with 22 supplemental benefit carriers a couple of months ago, looking for feedback on the work my company does and what they would find most valuable from our ongoing survey work now and into the future. The overwhelming refrain was—“Your data is great. But I’d like to know more about the ‘why’ behind the answers.” They wanted to connect the raw data to something meaningful and actionable; they wanted stories.
So, I pose the following idea: While data is crucial to our understanding of complex issues, supplementing that data with a humanistic view is also crucial, lest we forget the central mission in the business of insurance. Insurance is a promise to pay, and when insurers pay, it’s often at a vulnerable and painful point in the life of the customer. If the insurance industry continues to be led by data alone, we may miss great opportunities for connection and differentiation in the work we do.
My Story
It was March 2006 and I was sitting in a waiting room at the hospital. My then 30-year-old husband was getting a colonoscopy. I remember thinking what a big deal this was. It seemed like such a grown-up thing to be doing; driving a family member home from a medical procedure.
So, when the doctor came out into the lobby to chat with me, it didn’t register at all that while he kept referencing a “growth,” that ominous word should have hit me harder. The fact that it was the size of a softball didn’t fully impact me either. He said he “biopsied the hell out of it” and would have results for us the following Monday.
My whole world crashed down that Monday morning. My brain could hardly compute what we had heard. Stage 2 colon cancer. Immediate surgery. Genetic testing made sense because of his age. Was there a family history? Did we have children? Were we thinking about it? The questions, the decisions, the overwhelming fear I felt made it next to impossible to think straight or figure out how to navigate the health care system as a young woman with zero hospital experience.
The next three years were a trial-by-fire for me. We faced that first diagnosis and three surgeries (two unexpected) in six months. There was a period of 50 days where he was “NPO” (nothing by mouth), and I had to hook up a bag of nourishment and inject vitamins into it every night, administered through a peripherally inserted central catheter (PICC) line. I remember asking several hospital professionals, “Are you sure I’m allowed to do this?”
Following that first diagnosis was a year of mysterious pain only to find another softball-sized tumor had grown—this time, un-stageable. This time, 24-hour chemo and five days a week of radiation were part of the plan. This time, we weren’t sure what his prognosis was or chances of survival. The unknown was terrifying. All of this destructive treatment culminated in a 15-hour surgery in March 2008 to save my husband’s life.
(Spoiler alert: He will be 14 years cancer-free in March 2022.)
With my husband’s diagnosis, we had excellent insurance—a rich PPO plan with a small deductible. Yet our out-of-pocket costs didn’t stop at hospital visits and drugs. Things added up quickly between travel to the hospital and eating three meals a day there; I became best friends with everyone at Walgreens as I entered for the 47th time that week to pick up grape Propel (the only thing he could keep down while on chemo) or more gauze. I didn’t know about supplemental insurance or “critical illness” at that point in my life. I ask myself often if I would have even considered it at that age. Maybe not. But perhaps if more stories like these had been part of the sales pitch, it would’ve had more meaning.
Years later, I found my way into the supplemental benefits industry, working for a carrier. I remember being trained on a critical illness product, hearing the term “carcinoma-in-situ” and scratching my head. I’d never seen those words or heard that terminology anywhere. What did it mean? My trainer explained that carcinoma-in-situ is defined as cancer that has not spread beyond the site of origin. That seemed pretty broad; by that definition, anything from an early-stage melanoma, a stage two colon cancer, or even a stage one pancreatic cancer diagnosis could fit that definition, and that doesn’t speak to the treatment intensity or financial need. When a policyholder is interacting with critical illness coverage, do they know what this means? Do they feel the coverage is appropriate given their lived experience?
This was just the beginning of my path encountering well-intentioned product designs not lining up with real-life experience. Insurance carriers already struggle with the perception that they’re just looking for ways to deny claims. As I dove deeper into the inner-workings of the insurance world, I got to know my actuarial and compliance teams and understood the importance of balancing customer-centric decisions with sound financial principles. Rather than get discouraged, I saw an opportunity to use my lived experience for good, for change. It’s what drove me to pursue a role on the product development side, so I could infuse this knowledge into design.
In 2016, the day after Thanksgiving, my mother called me because my father was acting bizarre. He was a bit delirious, mumbling about going to get ice cream, and he was sitting in front of the glucose testing kit he’d used for multiple decades, bewildered. We called the paramedics, who tested his blood sugar, and it was off the charts. Turns out, we had intervened just before he went into diabetic ketoacidosis. What followed was three days in the hospital, two weeks in rehab, and then a family decision. He had been diagnosed with dementia a few years prior, but as anyone who has lived with this illness knows, it can be a gradual decline, oftentimes hard to detect day to day. Given the recent crisis, and the events of the past year (wandering into the street, setting the toaster on fire, multiple falls in the shower, and a decreasing ability to manage regular life things—paying bills, using the computer, even driving home from familiar places), we knew this was the moment to make a care decision. He needed help.
A couple of years later, in 2018, my mother was diagnosed with early-stage breast cancer. One day I was presenting products to some brokers talking about the importance of genetic testing and lauding the genetic test benefit on a supplemental product. The next day I was sitting in front of a genetic counselor watching my mother get tested for the BRCA gene wondering if my sister and I would soon have a difficult decision to make about our own breast health.
It is not lost on me how these crucial life moments tie into the work I do. From the need for long-term care insurance and the lack of perceiving that need until it’s too late, to the unexpected hospital bills that come with any kind of health event, I had a personal experience that tied to nearly every product I sold. My husband’s cancer put him on short-term disability twice and then long-term disability after the second go-round. While it’s been joked about (gently, lovingly) that I should be careful as I walk down the stairs, because I don’t yet have an “accident product” story, I can’t help but feel an incredibly deep and meaningful connection to the idea of voluntary benefits (VB) and the impact they have on consumers.
By the time my dad’s care became necessary, I was no longer a newbie to the world of VB. I had been preaching the importance of long-term care insurance long before I had a personal story. But living through it was another thing. My parents did not have any supplemental insurance, and they definitely didn’t have a long-term care policy. It soon became necessary for my sister and I to petition for guardianship of my dad, as nothing had been set up legally and my mom was in no position to manage his care decisions. It was a terrifying time, as my dad was prone to escape attempts and we weren’t sure how long it would be before he needed full-time nursing. Navigating this process was a total mystery, and while some of my experience with my husband’s cancer carried over, it was a new landscape. I know firsthand, the need for caregiver support is real.
The stress of his care while trying to function at my job was enough to send me into a mental health crisis; one I should’ve recognized, as I’d been through this kind of high-stakes health situation with a loved one before. Thankfully, the right intervention of therapy, medicine, and support was enough to start me back on the road to recovery. It was in this season that mental health became front and center for me, and I have been on a mission ever since for parity, increased awareness, and compassionate support in the voluntary benefits market.
The timing of this all happened while I was in the thick of designing a new hospital indemnity plan. My design team knew what was happening in my world, but it wasn’t just me having the real-life experiences. During that period of time, my team saw two children hospitalized, one wife taken to the ER with mysterious chest pains, a baby born, a cancer scare, and a broken arm. Each of these stories fueled our work. This was the real stuff.
Human-centered Design—a Lasting Strategy of Compassion
It’s vital to remember that at its core, the insurance industry serves human beings. Insurers are here to provide meaningful protection for the markets they serve. If they lose focus on the real people—the stories, the varying policyholder journeys, and the needs insurers are tasked with meeting—the industry limits its impact. An effective strategy needs to incorporate the human side.
In my many years working with the broker community, that message carries over. I’ve worked with brokers from Little Rock to Boston, and Dallas to Seattle; every single time I start talking about voluntary products, stories begin to emerge. The stories connect us to each other and to the importance of what we do. But too often we go back to our day-to-day lives and get bogged down in the legalese of contract language, or the technical requirements of building a product on a system, and we lose our north star.
My past experiences are a part of who I am now, not something I lived through. As the industry becomes more conscientious, it is important to normalize talking about the scary and unknown and couple it with the promises made to customers. It’s time to dream up new ways to provide support, carve new paths for products and services that don’t exist today, and find new ways to engage with the people on the other side of the contracts.
Human-centered design, coupled with meaningful stories to tell, will allow insurers to create relationships with their customers along the entire sales journey. Combining human-centered design with data, execution, and insights may be the silver bullet. One of my sales partners used to say, “Sales is just a transfer of passion.” Focus on transferring the passion of what you love about this work to customers—all of them. That’s a winning story.
Statements of fact and opinions expressed herein are those of the individual authors and are not necessarily those of the Society of Actuaries, the newsletter editors, or the respective authors’ employers.
Christin Kuretich is a strategy consultant for Milliman. She can be contacted at christin.kuretich@milliman.com. LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/christin-kuretich/