Feature: How nib is leveraging The Lumery to stay ahead of the game in digital

As a leading Australian health fund, nib is a trusted international health partner that empowers its members to make better decisions and improve health outcomes through greater accessibility to affordable health services and information. They provide health and medical insurance to over 1.6 million Australian and New Zealand residents.

The digital growth journey at nib

Over the past years, nib has maintained a strong focus on building its digital capability to support membership growth, with increased marketing automation, insights and processes. “My team is responsible for putting in place technology that helps us manage leads more effectively across our online and offline experiences,” explains nib’s Head of Digital, Adam Hatfield. While the focus was always been about leveraging digital for sales growth, “in the last 18 months, this focus and the learnings have been taken to the broader business, as it has evolved into building capability the entire business can use to improve the experience for our members.” This wider focus includes greater collaboration between marketing, customer service and other functions.

The last 12 months has seen a specific shift towards data and experimentation for nib. “One of the things I’ve learned over the years is that everyone has an opinion about what a website should look like. Using experimentation and A/B testing to find the answer, removes all opinions and delivers better business results,” says Adam. This has led to the hiring of a marketing focused data scientist and greater adoption of centralised customer data technology and capability.

Partnering with The Lumery to validate digital direction

Last year, nib turned to The Lumery to provide an independent digital capability review, to validate nib’s digital decisions and provide a roadmap outlining what they should do next.

“We had invested heavily in technology and we were seeing the business results we wanted, but this also gave us remit to check that we were on the right path,” says Adam. “We needed validation that we were at the forefront of this space and we also wanted help identifying other areas we could focus on.”

“There were some blind spots in our capability monitoring, where the data was too high level and didn’t give us the full view that my team needed,” says Adam.

The Lumery reviewed nib’s digital capability by interviewing key stakeholders, mapping their technology landscape and creating recommendations based on nib’s needs and The Lumery’s deep expertise in the MarTech space. Using The Lumery’s digital maturity scale, improvement areas were identified and The Lumery educated nib on how those areas could fit together to accelerate capability growth.

“The Lumery fit the sweet spot for us, where they understood marketing automation, on-site optimisation and the customer data platform landscape, which in my opinion is very unique,” states Adam. “We did consider other digital agencies and consultancies, but we felt they worked at a high level whereas The Lumery provided the amount of depth we needed.”

On the right track and sprinting forward

Since partnering with The Lumery, nib has continued to analyse their position through the lens of data, people, process and technology. “Looking through these viewpoints, it has helped us better understand what was going on and what our opportunities to change were,” Adam explains.

“The outcome was that we had invested in the right technology, but our gaps were around our data and processes. Knowing this has allowed us to shift focus onto these areas,” says Adam. One of the recommendations to nib was to align all departments on the specific meaning of ‘personalisation’. To nib’s credit, this has sparked clear and considered alignment across departments on the definition and value of personalisation. This included additional support from The Lumery to create new frameworks and methods for delivering personalisation-at-scale.

This was just one finding among wider set recommendations for growth at nib. “Overall, it was a thought-provoking piece for not just my team but the entire business, which has allowed us to concentrate on the right things,” states Adam.

“nib was a refreshing project to work on for both myself and The Lumery, as nib is a business excelling in digital, but they also see the true value in external insight and validation. nib actively proves that constant, iterative improvement across the board results in huge benefits both digitally and to the wider business,” says Ben Desailly, Senior Martech Consultant, The Lumery.

Find out more about The Lumery here.