17.09.2025

Journey Operations: From Silo Thinking to Customer Centricity

Author: Lisa Gumprich, Director Digital Strategy

Today, people expect more from their health insurance companies than reliable coverage. They want services that are simple, fast, and personal. Yet many health insurers face obstacles: outdated processes, data silos, and fragmented offerings hinder a seamless customer experience. As a result, digital services are barely used, and valuable efficiency gains are left untapped. Journey Operations offer insurers the opportunity to change this and take on a proactive role in shaping a modern healthcare culture.

Growing Expectations, Rising Pressure on Health Insurers

Expectations are increasing: customers now demand not only benefits but a seamless, digital, and personalised experience. Those who can deliver this build genuine closeness and position themselves as trusted partners in people’s everyday lives.

However, many insurers face structural barriers. Processes have often evolved historically, offerings are poorly integrated, and data sits in isolated systems. Members encounter a fragmented service landscape, underuse digital solutions, and insurers miss out on efficiency and prevention potential. Journey Operations provide a targeted way forward: positioning insurers as digital pioneers and active drivers of a modern, experience-led healthcare culture.

What Are Journey Operations?

The key lies in a change of perspective: moving away from thinking in departments and individual products, towards complete customer journeys. Journey Operations is a strategic approach that makes it possible to create transparency across the entire customer journey – from prevention and treatment through to service and communication. Instead of isolated measures, it enables a seamless experience across all touchpoints. Processes and services are no longer defined by system logic but designed, managed, and continuously optimised from the customer’s perspective.

The Core Challenges: Complexity, Silos, Lack of Transparenc

Both statutory and private health insurers face organisational and technological barriers. Especially in digital contexts, several prerequisites for holistic customer experiences are often missing:

Fragmented service landscape: Services and information are spread across multiple portals and channels.
Limited scalability: New digital services are difficult to integrate into existing structures and processes.
Insufficient customer insights: A lack of real-time data prevents deeper understanding of member behaviour, needs, and expectations.
Unclear success measurement: Without cross-journey KPIs, the impact of new initiatives often remains invisible.

The consequence: efficiency potential, member engagement, and opportunities for modern, digital healthcare remain untapped.

From Individual Services to Integrated Member Journeys

The future viability of insurers depends not on individual products but on the quality of the entire member journey. To promote health sustainably while unlocking efficiency gains, insurers must overcome silos and merge care, prevention, and service into holistic, end-to-end experiences. Journey Operations address exactly this challenge – not as another buzzword, but as a strategic evolution of methods such as Customer Journey Mapping and Journey Management. The approach goes beyond visualisation. It builds operational structures that enable member journeys to be actively managed, measured, and continuously improved.

The result: a system that works across all touchpoints. Moving away from fragmented services towards seamless service chains. This allows insurers to redefine their role – from administrators to active shapers of a digital, prevention-oriented, and member-focused healthcare system.

How Journey Operations Work: Three Building Blocks for Future-Oriented Journeys

Journey Operations are not a one-off project or workshop format. They are an ongoing operational system that puts members at the centre. Three key building blocks make the system work: journey mapping, journey measurement and journey management:

Journey Mapping – Identifying What Matters

How do members experience their health insurer – for example with sick pay, a digital doctor’s visit, or family health management? Journey Mapping makes these touchpoints visible, data-driven, and cross-functional. In structured workshops, central journeys are identified, prioritised, and aligned with common goals. This creates transparency and lays the foundation for focused improvements.
Journey Measurement – Understanding What Works

How well do the identified journeys actually perform? Journey Measurement combines real-time data, CX metrics (e.g. NPS), digital usage data, and analogue touchpoints such as call centre interactions to create a comprehensive picture. This enables fact-based management and makes improvement potential immediately visible.
Journey Management – Steering What Should Improve

Journey Management establishes clear structures for the continuous development of services – always from the member’s perspective. Standardised formats ensure comparability and transparency in decision-making, so that services across all life stages and touchpoints deliver real value to people while generating measurable benefits for the organisation.

Measurable Value for Health Insurers

Implementing Journey Operations is not an end in itself – it directly supports the key goals of modern insurers: better user experiences, more efficient processes, and stronger member loyalty. According to McKinsey, the effects include:

+25% digital adoption: Improved guidance, clear service structures, and personalised communication significantly increase acceptance of digital offerings.
+35% higher conversion rates: Consistent, targeted experiences strengthen loyalty and boost uptake of additional services.
+25 points in Net Promoter Score (NPS): Satisfied members remain loyal and recommend their insurer.
–15% process costs: Automated processes and targeted optimisation reduce internal effort and free up resources.

Journey Operations: Now Is the Time to Put Members First

Customer centricity is no longer a nice-to-have – it has become a fundamental requirement. With IBM iX, insurers can make the shift: from rigid structures to agile, user-centred organisations. Leveraging AI-driven analytics, cross-functional collaboration, and continuous journey optimisation, they can achieve a new level of efficiency and service quality – tangible for members, measurable for the organisation.

Now is the time to actively shape digital transformation. Competition is accelerating, and members today expect more than administrative services. They expect experiences that truly matter.