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Medibank centralising data to deliver personalised customer experience

Turning to Salesforce to gain a single view of its customer.
Written by Asha Barbaschow, Contributor

Medibank is embarking on a project to centralise its data, with hopes to gain a single view of its customer.

"Single view of the customer means single view of privacy," Medibank Digital transformation and technology leader Jon Goh said, speaking at Salesforce World Tour Reimagined earlier this month.

"Preference management and permissions are really critical for us … we really have to focus on simplifying our data structures and integrations to enable this.

"Member privacy is at the heart of everything we do at Medibank."

The Australian private health insurance provider has turned to Salesforce for help with centralising its preference and subscription centre data, through the use of Marketing Cloud and Audience Studio.

Goh said while Medibank has been a customer of Salesforce for over 10 years, its acceleration of the tools available only begun around four years ago when Marketing Cloud was implemented.

"From the outset, we tried to take a different approach to it … we hired a few key roles to augment the internal team, then really grew our capability to manage the platform. So today, we really have a thriving marketing automation practice with a clear roadmap for future growth," he said.

According to Goh, the biggest challenge for Medibank will be maintaining relevance with its members in what he called "a highly competitive environment", while also focusing on their health needs.

"How do we maintain strong product differentiation across our brands? … how do we build out a dynamic marketing data strategy to enable enterprise agility and achieve deep insights?" he explained. "And finally, how do we use our current technology and capability stack to deliver that real one-to-one health experience for our members?"

Medibank uses a lot of Salesforce tech; in total, it has around 130 live Salesforce campaigns. Around 65 of those have been converted into "behavioural-based journeys utilising Marketing Cloud".

"We use those to educate our audience on the best way to utilise their cover, learn more about their products," Medibank marketing platforms manager Niall Bishop added.

"We streamlined our advertising campaigns to provide a consistent experience. Then we took that same approach with our internal training and reskilling … because we've implemented most of the technologies ourselves, this allowed us the ability to deliver on our marketing strategy at a pace."

Goh said looking forward, Medibank would continue its focus on member experience, but said from a tech standpoint, there are "a number of things in the pipeline".

"First off … this cross-platform integration. We have a lot of martech [marketing technology] assets, we'd like to integrate all of these to deliver a better personalisation," he said.

"And the second thing … the CDP technology and how we manage real-time decisioning."

Medibank is currently participating in the Salesforce Customer Data Platform (CDP) pilot to determine how it could incorporate the technology into its stack.

Goh said the organisation is also looking at service integration, and how it could create an omni-channel experience that covers all facets of the business to give customers "the most relevant experience no matter what channel they choose".

Medibank is also in the process of reviewing its platform architecture with Salesforce.

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