Wikis Lead The Way

Having just checked out Novarica's recently published "Web 2.0 in Insurance: Finding Real Business Value Today and Tomorrow," I couldn't help but recall Humana's use of an internal Wiki to help customer service representatives share best practices with one another. (Nor could I help but notice the report's explicitly mentioned disdain for Second Life coverage. Ouch.)

Interestingly, the report found that 39 percent of insurers surveyed said that they were already using wikis in their organizations and found the practice valuable. That number made wikis the top area (tied with AJAX) where insurers saw potential for Web 2.0 to deliver value.So, I thought this would be a good time to revisit Humana's early pilot program in using a wiki for internal communication. This first appeared in a Web 2.0 cover story in the May 2008 issue of I&T:

Internally, Humana has leveraged the Web 2.0 concept of wikis -- Web-based collaborative editing software -- to become more agile in managing cross-functional teams. Piloted last summer across several Humana groups, the wikis proved their worth, particularly among customer service reps, according to [Greg] Matthews, [director of integrated consumer experience for Humana].

Recently, the health insurer experimented with physically placing customer service representatives in select Humana sales offices and doctors offices. Members loved the concept, Matthews says, because they were able to ask questions about their benefits at the point of treatment. It was, however, a new and different experience for the customer service reps, who previously had interacted with customers only over the telephone. When it came to servicing customers in a face-to-face environment, reps needed to overcome a learning curve, which was accelerated by the online collaborative tools.

"All of their case management [now] was handled through a wiki that they could use to share best practices and ask questions of their peers who were in the same situation," Matthews relates. "What it meant was that we had a real-time learning laboratory and repository for that data that enabled them to make changes on the fly."

For now, the wiki projects have remained internal. Going forward, however, Humana may launch customer-facing wikis, using lessons learned from its internal experiment to improve the process, Matthews says. "In a way, we're sort of in training internally to be able to leverage and make ourselves open to feedback from the outside world," he adds.