Consulting firm monitors social media to find and address retiree requests, issues and problems

Among the services Willis Towers Watson offers is a Medicare health benefits delivery system that services mostly retirees. Through normal monitoring, the firm detected a rise in the number of people covered in the program posting to social media. Two of the organization’s clients—a public sector retirement program and a global Fortune 50 tech organization—wondered how to best address their social media inquiries. That led to a proposal for an innovative new program dubbed “No Retiree Left Behind”—which has won first place in the “Health Care Marketing” category of PR Daily’s 2017 Digital PR & Social Media Awards. 

The program “would not only monitor for these social posts but also ensure that they were fully resolved and reported on so we could track that concerns were being resolved.” The proposal faced a number of challenges, including the need to find posts on social channels (like Facebook) that are difficult to monitor using social media monitoring software. The proposal also recognized that a lot of Medicare recipients are new to social media, and that communication would have to comply with a range of government regulations. 

The proposal was accepted and funded. Willis Towers Watson hired a staffer with customer service experience from a social media marketing organization to conduct manual searches of social media networks throughout the day. The firm also settled on a “highly specialized platform, which used machine learning to continually improve the search algorithms, which allowed us to break through the barrier of the post data not available though most social platforms APIs.” 

Governance was established to guide how replies to inquiries would be handled, which included connecting with 12 different departments to ensure issues received complete follow-through. The system also developed a set of analytics for reporting results (delivered through a dashboard to the two clients). 

One sign of the program’s success is that Willis Towers Watson has begun offering it to all its other prospects and clients. 

Congratulations to the team of Melanie Meharchand, Devin Bliss and Christopher Felt.