Nomenclature | Cigna
The Empathy Protocol: Operationalizing Trust
Problem: The healthcare industry is notorious for alienating customers with dense, legalistic jargon. This created a barrier of confusion and mistrust between the payer and the patient.
Solution: We operationalized empathy and combined it with common-sense knowledge. I helped develop and deploy a mandatory plain speak lexicon that shifted the entire organization (and eventually the rest of the healthcare industry) to replace internal corporate-speak with human-centric language.
Outcome: The "Words We Use" Guide > A strategic glossary that standardized clear, accessible communication across millions of customer touchpoints. This improved customer knowledge, confidence, and loyalty. It saved Cigna money in that it reduced CSR time and led to greater employee and customer satisfaction.
