The Sponsor Retires in Nine Weeks
Meridian Health Plans covers 2.4M members across two operating units - Group (employer-sponsored) and Individual (exchange and Medicare). Fourteen months ago the COO launched a CX program: NPS is 31 against a 38 industry benchmark, the annual budget is $3.2M, and 60% of it is already committed to a CRM and survey-platform rollout. The COO retires in nine weeks and no named successor has CX in their charter. Group reports NPS 44 and Individual reports NPS 12; the two units use different vendors, different question wording, and different definitions of 'member' (subscriber vs. household). Meanwhile the operations scorecard still pays contact-center leaders on average handle time. The CEO wants a one-page CX strategy in six weeks and remarked offhandedly that 'if this doesn't show a return by next fiscal year, we should fold it into marketing.'
1. What are your first three moves to keep the program alive past the COO's departure, and why in that order?
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Reasoning frame: a CX program without an owner in the operating model is a project, and projects get re-orged.
- Secure a permanent home before you write strategy. The nine-week window is the real constraint, not the six-week deadline. Identify which executive's P&L is affected by the Individual unit's NPS of 12 (likely the Chief Growth or Individual Markets officer) and get CX written into that role's charter with budget authority. Strategy written for a departing sponsor dies with the sponsor; strategy written for a P&L owner survives.
- Convert one contested metric into one governed metric. You cannot hand the CEO a strategy while two units report two truths. Stand up a small CX governance council (Group, Individual, Ops, Finance, Marketing) with decision rights over measurement standards - not over local execution. Governance is what makes the program institutional rather than personal.
- Buy an early, finance-credible win before the fiscal-year ultimatum lands. Pick one journey with a hard dollar attached (e.g., Individual-unit onboarding abandonment) and instrument it now, so that by the time the CEO evaluates 'return,' you have a measured before/after, not an NPS delta.
Why this order: steps 1 and 2 are structural and time-boxed by the retirement; step 3 is the only thing that answers the CEO's implicit question. Doing 3 first produces a nice result with no owner to defend it. Doing 1 without 2 produces an owner holding contradictory numbers, which is worse than no owner at all.
2. How do you handle the 44 versus 12 NPS gap - reconcile to a single number, keep both, or drop both? Justify your choice against what the CEO will actually do with the number.
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Start from use, not from statistical purity. The CEO will use this number in three ways: in board reporting, to allocate budget, and to judge whether the program is working. Each use tolerates a different amount of complexity.
- For board reporting and target-setting: you need one number, but it must be built on a common instrument. Reconcile by moving both units to a single survey with identical wording, timing, and respondent definition (household is the defensible unit for a payer - it is who experiences care coordination). Expect the Group number to fall and the Individual number to move; plan the narrative for that before it happens, or the reconciliation will look like deterioration.
- For diagnosis and prioritization: keep the segment-level view. A blended NPS of 31 hides that the Individual unit is likely where regulatory risk, churn, and call volume concentrate. Never let the single number become the only number anyone looks at.
- What not to do: do not average 44 and 12, and do not publish both without translation. Publishing two numbers invites the CEO to pick the flattering one and creates a running argument between unit leaders that consumes the governance council's credibility.
The practical sequencing: run both instruments in parallel for one quarter with a bridging question set, publish the reconciled number as 'restated,' and attach a one-paragraph explanation of the methodology change. Then lock the instrument for at least four quarters. Changing methodology twice in a year destroys trend and hands the CEO a reason to fold CX into marketing.
3. The CEO says the program may be folded into marketing next fiscal year. What is your response, and what decision does that comment force you to make?
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Read the comment as a diagnosis question, not a threat. 'Fold it into marketing' means the CEO cannot currently see a mechanism connecting CX work to a business outcome. Arguing about organizational placement misses the point; the placement is a symptom.
Response structure:
- Acknowledge the test the CEO is applying (return by next fiscal year) and accept it explicitly. Programs that resist measurement get folded.
- Reframe what 'return' means in this business. For a payer, the credible value levers are: Individual-unit retention and member acquisition cost, call deflection and contact-center cost per member, and Star/HEDIS-adjacent quality outcomes. Marketing owns none of these alone - which is the argument against folding, made on the CEO's terms rather than on turf.
- Present two or three candidate value pools with rough sizing and the measurement approach for each, and ask the CEO to pick the one the program will be held to. Getting the CEO to choose the success criterion is what converts a vague ultimatum into an accountable target.
The decision it forces: whether CX is positioned as a growth/retention capability or as a service-quality capability. These imply different owners, different metrics, and different budgets. Trying to be both is why the program currently has 60% of budget in platforms and no attributable outcome. Pick one as the primary thesis for the coming fiscal year, keep the other as supporting evidence, and say so in the one-pager. Ambiguity here is what makes 'fold it into marketing' sound reasonable to a CEO.