As trainers, you know the importance of NOT putting the cart before the horse. While there has to be room for creativity and innovation in any process, sometimes it’s also true that the wheels drive the bus, and by following the natural order, you’ll end up ahead of the pack. 

For example, let’s look at learning at Humana, one of the nation’s leading providers of healthcare plans, benefits and services. With about 28,000 employees, Humana is a vast organization specializing in health insurance, dental insurance and corporate benefits.

Here’s the thing you probably already know about such companies: People tend to use them most at the point of need, and when the need here is healthcare, people are often not at their best when connecting with the company. In situations like that, as I know you know, it’s time for some good customer service.

Enter into this story Cheri Greenfield, Humana’s director of perfect service. In addition to having one of the coolest corporate titles ever, Greenfield is leading Humana’s mission to transform the way people think about health insurance. She’s been on that mission since 2005, based on a challenge from CEO Mike McCallister to think about what perfect service is, and how Humana could deliver on that promise.

Greenfield and her colleagues spent a few months considering the question, then turned to the Disney Institute, the training arm of one of the companies they most wanted to emulate in terms of service delivery, the Disney Co. As part of an ongoing partnership, Humana worked with the Disney Institute to review the company’s goals and objectives and build a new vision for service.

Now, Humana sees that service as an opportunity to connect with all the levels of customer – the member, the employer and the healthcare provider – at the time they most need assistance. That’s a message Greenfield and her team is communicating to every Humana associate. They’ve defined perfect service as having six characteristics:

• Accurate
• Reliable
• Easy to use
• Courteous
• Proactive
• Personalized

The lessons around those six elements started with building the basics, like courtesy and accuracy, then moving on to being proactive and to personalization. The message is going to every customer service associate, but also to their leaders. Greenfield said teams of 100 to 300 are going through four-hour sessions to really bring the concepts home for the specific business units.

Those four- to eight-hour sessions, which include CEO Mike McCallister and COO Jim Murray, become two-way streets, with associates contributing their own ideas. The learning that goes into and out of the sessions eventually makes its way into training materials, policies, procedures and new orientation programs.

“In a few meetings I was in we actually either delayed initiatives or pulled out initiatives and reframed them so they focused on how we could deliver on our perfect service promise,” said Greenfield. “We really tried to integrate it through everything.”

So far, about 26,000 of Humana’s 28,000 associates have undergone perfect service training. It’s an ongoing process with no end in sight: Greenfield plans to continue bringing people in to continue the evolution of perfect service at Humana. She likens the mission to mountain climbing: You won’t make the summit the first day, but by establishing a series of base camps, you’ll get there.

Humana, by the way, is getting there. The company has seen a significant drop in “rework” needed on incomplete or improperly prepared claims forms, saving time and money, and has reduced call volume by more than 2 million calls due to better handling and proactively providing information to customers before they call. What’s more, a study conducted with the Gallup Organization has shown increased engagement among Humana associates across the board.

Humana is clearly committed to the mission of perfect service. In a couple of months, when the rest of the nation marks the first week of October as Customer Service Week (you got that memo, right?), Humana will be celebrating internally with their own spin: They’ve rebranded that time as Perfect Service Week.

“We’re never done with it. You never really reach the summit,” Greenfield said. “You constantly say how do we continue to reinvent ourselves, how do we continue to leverage the feedback from our consumers and customers to continue to evolve on our journey? We’ve found everyone wants to be on the winning team, everyone wants to be perfect. People really rallied around that.”