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Customer Value in the Healthcare Segment: Master thesis about the factors creating value in insurance offerings

Bos, Geert (2012) Customer Value in the Healthcare Segment: Master thesis about the factors creating value in insurance offerings.

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Abstract:This study is about customer value in business-to-business insurance offerings in the healthcare segment. Woodall (2003, p.2) defines customer value as “any demand-side, personal perception of advantage arising out of a customer’s association with an organisation’s offering, and can occur as reduction in sacrifice; presence of benefit (perceived as either attributes or outcomes); the resultant of any weighed combination of sacrifice and benefit (determined and expressed either rationally or intuitively); or an aggregation,, over time, of any or all of these.” The research is carried out for the marketing department of the Dutch insurer Centraal Beheer Achmea (CBA). According to CBA it is important to be customer-oriented. The goal is to become the most trusted insurer by focusing on market-oriented segments in the damage insurances business segment. One of the chosen segments is healthcare, and as a starting point the Nursery Care with Care Accommodation (NCCA) sub segment which consists of i.a. nursing homes, houses for mentally handicapped persons, day-care centres, rest homes and youth care. For this sub segment a new insurance offering, consisting of products and services, is developed by a multidisciplinary team of people from Marketing, Sales and Business Line. The aim of the proposition is creating value to the business customer in this segment in order to expand their portfolio, volume and market share. The question, however, arises if this healthcare proposition indeed is valuable to the customer. How can CBA add value to this customer segment in order to reach their targets? The research question therefore is: ‘How does Centraal Beheer Achmea create customer value with its proposition in the healthcare segment?’ The method for this research consists of three phases. First explorative interviews are held with 10 employees of CBA in order to acquire perceived customer value factors. In the second phase, these factors are given a weighting on their relative importance by 12 employees of CBA. In the third phase, semi-structured interviews are held with 13 key decision-makers of potential and existing healthcare customers in order to verify and validate the factors creating actual customer value in this segment. These organisations also have given their weighting of importance on these factors. This multi-dimensional measurement scale is based on the works of Woodruff and Gardial (1996) and Ulaga and Chacour (2001), and demonstrated to be a useful tool in exploring and comparing the factors creating value. In the analysis, comparisons are made on size of healthcare organisations, disciplines of care, and between existing customers and prospects. Also a qualitative analysis and an analysis of the value factors in the healthcare proposition are made. The results show that the underlying factors creating customer value are: price, clarity of offer, range of covering, innovative products (product-related), knowledge sharing, basic services, supporting services, extraordinary services (service-related), image and personal contact (promotion-related). Other results demonstrate for example that product- and service-related factors are of equal importance for healthcare organisations. Healthcare organisations highly value good services because these can ‘unburden’ the key decision-makers of the insurances. Furthermore, services are valued more by healthcare organisations when business size increases. Smaller organisations value product-related factors much more than larger organisations, and larger organisations value service- and promotion-related factors much more than smaller organisations. Reason for this is that the key decision-makers of these large organisations have more interest and concern with an insurer who is reliable, provides goods services and takes work out of their hands. In smaller organisations the basic product elements are most important. Innovative products are hardly valued by healthcare organisations and quickly copied by competitors.
Item Type:Essay (Master)
Clients:
Centraal Beheer Achmea
Faculty:BMS: Behavioural, Management and Social Sciences
Subject:85 business administration, organizational science
Programme:Business Administration MSc (60644)
Link to this item:https://purl.utwente.nl/essays/61596
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