Health insurance

Public and private health insurance providers must brace themselves for considerably tougher times starting in 2009: Customers will be able to switch providers more easily and there will be greater price transparency. To stay competitive, providers need to innovate faster and cater to new market trends, while still focusing on their traditional core business.

Public and private insurers must take action on several fronts:

• Be faster than the rest. Constant innovation must be an integral part of the company's organization and culture
• Cater to new market trends. Companies have to constantly seize new trends and turn them into attractive offers
• Master traditional business areas. These include competitive cost structures and professional brand management

Roland Berger supports public and private insurers in all of these areas. For such projects, it is particularly important to view the various fields in a strategic context. For example, choosing the proper target group can help optimize marketing strategies and reduce costs at the same time. What's more, price elasticity models help us define what effect a decrease in administrative costs will have on attracting and supporting customers.

Brand positioning and sales in a large public health insurance fund

For one of the largest public health insurance providers, we used the "RB Profiler", our tool for strategic brand management. Our goal was to adjust the brand positioning to address target groups and competitors. Based on our findings, product marketing plus activities in sales and customer service were realigned. These activities were tested in pilot programs which proved that success was certainly attainable.

Reducing costs for public and private health insurance providers

We developed strategies for improving the concept and organizational structures in those areas of public and private health insurance providers with the most significant spending. Subsequently, we devised a detailed implementation plan and helped put it into practice. In this way, we were able to not only reach our savings goals, but even exceed them.

The necessary coordinating processes, with employee representatives, administration committees, etc. are an integral part of our project.