This article was based on the interview with CareFirst CMO Mack McGee on building the total experience across customers and employees by Greg Kihlström, AI and MarTech keynote speaker for The Agile Brand with Greg Kihlström podcast. Listen to the original episode here:
As marketing leaders, we are the designated champions of the customer. We craft the brand promise, articulate the value proposition, and design the journeys we hope our customers will follow. We invest heavily in technology and talent to deliver seamless, personalized interactions. Yet, we are all too aware of the gap that often exists between the experience we design in our marketing war rooms and the one a customer actually lives. This chasm is particularly pronounced in industries where the customer journey is long, complex, and involves countless handoffs between departments that don’t report to the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO). Healthcare is, perhaps, the ultimate final boss in this regard.
It’s an industry where customers—or “members”—are often navigating vulnerable, stressful moments. Clarity is paramount, yet complexity is the default. Trust is the most valuable currency, yet it is notoriously difficult to earn and tragically easy to lose. That’s why it’s particularly noteworthy when a health insurer not only excels but is recognized as the leader in “Total Experience.” CareFirst recently earned this distinction from Forrester, and it wasn’t by launching a clever ad campaign. It was by treating experience as an operating principle, not a marketing message. In a recent conversation, CareFirst CMO Mack McGee shared how his organization made this crucial shift, offering a playbook for any leader looking to close the gap between promise and reality.
Defining Experience Through the Lens of Mission
The first, and arguably most critical, step is to reframe what “experience” even means. In many organizations, it’s a set of metrics—NPS, CSAT, CES—that we track, report on, and try to nudge upwards. While valuable, these are lagging indicators of sentiment. For CareFirst, the definition is far more foundational and is inextricably linked to the organization’s core purpose. It’s not about delighting customers for delight’s sake; it’s about fulfilling a mission.
“I look at total experience really as what is the promise the organization is making, right? And how well are we fulfilling that promise to the people we serve? And there’s a lot of people that go in around that… For us, that’s a lot of the mission around access, affordability, equity, and outcomes. And then looking at how are we doing at driving on those things through the different strategies, and efforts that we’re deploying, and how well are we delivering on that on behalf of those we serve.”
This is a powerful shift. When the goal is no longer “improve the NPS score by 5 points” but “deliver on our mission of affordability and access,” the conversation changes. It forces a more holistic view that transcends departmental silos. Every decision, from product design to call center scripting to claims processing, can be evaluated against a simple question: “Does this help us fulfill our promise?” This mission-driven lens elevates the work from a series of tactical improvements to a strategic imperative. It also provides a North Star that everyone in the organization, from the C-suite to the front lines, can navigate by. It’s the difference between asking “How can we make this touchpoint better?” and “How does this touchpoint deliver on our fundamental reason for being?”
Unifying the Organization with a Shared Scorecard
Of course, a North Star is only useful if everyone agrees to follow it. One of the greatest challenges for any marketing leader championing an experience initiative is getting buy-in from operational partners. Their goals, metrics, and incentives are often very different. The finance department is focused on cost, operations on efficiency, and legal on compliance. To them, “experience” can sound like a soft, unquantifiable marketing objective. CareFirst tackled this head-on by creating a measurement framework that reflects the entire business, not just the marketing department’s sentiment trackers.
“There is no experience agenda for a company that is separate of the company’s agenda… what we got into early was the idea that we were gonna create an experience scorecard that was made up of measures from across the organization that honestly were being measured and reported on and discussed, but we were gonna have that conversation through an experience lens going forward and what the impact was… It allowed people to see their work in the scorecard, and it allowed people to see that their work matters as it relates to experience.”
McGee offered a brilliantly simple example: the timeliness of a new member’s ID card arriving in the mail. This isn’t a marketing metric. It’s an operational one, owned by teams far outside the CMO’s direct influence. Yet, for a new member, that physical card is one of the first tangible proofs of the company’s promise. Its timely arrival builds confidence; its delay sows doubt. By incorporating operational metrics like this into a shared “experience scorecard,” CareFirst accomplished something crucial. They didn’t just ask other departments to care about experience; they demonstrated how the work those departments already do and the metrics they already track are, in fact, experience metrics. This approach reframes the conversation from “help us with our marketing goal” to “let’s collectively achieve our business goal.” It’s a masterclass in building cross-functional alignment by speaking the language of your partners.
The Symbiotic Link Between Employee and Customer Experience
Total Experience, by definition, considers all the humans involved—not just the customer. It recognizes that a frustrated, ill-equipped employee cannot possibly deliver a clear, empathetic, and effective customer experience. This seems obvious, yet many organizations pursue CX and EX initiatives on separate, parallel tracks. CareFirst’s success demonstrates the power of treating them as two sides of the same coin. The journey to improving their member experience began by improving their employee experience.
“These folks were doing amazing work, but they were clicking between 12, 14 screens to try and answer a question that Greg the member called in for… And so we said, ‘Let’s go invest there.’ And so we invested in overhauling the technology that defined the service center for us, to make that experience not just better for the member, but better for the employees that were showing up every day to do their job. And I think that’s what’s beautiful about the total experience is it looks at the extrapolation of how these things play in.”
Imagine trying to provide a “simple, clear, and human” answer when you’re wrestling with a dozen different applications. It’s an impossible task. By investing in better internal tools, CareFirst didn’t just make their employees’ lives easier; they directly enabled a better member outcome. This is the essence of Total Experience. It means looking at every internal process, every system, and every policy and asking how it either helps or hinders the person serving the end customer. McGee notes that data from employee engagement surveys can be a powerful leading indicator of future customer experience challenges. If your teams are struggling with internal IT, that friction will inevitably spill over into customer interactions. Fixing the employee’s problem is often the most direct path to fixing the customer’s.
A Human-Centric Vision for Technology
Looking ahead, it’s impossible to discuss the future of experience without mentioning AI. The hype is unavoidable. But in a regulated, high-stakes industry like healthcare, a “move fast and break things” approach is a non-starter. A wrong answer from a chatbot isn’t an inconvenience; it can have serious consequences. McGee’s perspective on AI is refreshingly pragmatic and human-centric. It’s not about replacing humans but about augmenting them, freeing them up to do what they do best.
“What I hope we can look at in this is there’s a lot of other basic queries and basic tasks people wanna get done… that we should be able to leverage this technology set to help solve for, to clear space for people to have higher level touch and interactions with people that want that… Our right to sit in that moment with a member and serve them I think will be tested.”
This vision sees AI’s immediate role as a powerful engine for handling the routine so humans can handle the moments that matter. Can a member check the status of a claim, find an in-network provider, or understand their deductible without having to call someone? AI can and should power those interactions, delivering fast, clear answers. This efficiency doesn’t just reduce costs; it builds member confidence and clears the phone lines for the person who has a complex diagnosis, is facing a difficult decision, or simply needs the reassurance of a human conversation. This thoughtful application of technology reinforces the brand’s promise by meeting the customer where they are—providing instant, automated answers for simple needs and accessible, expert human support for complex ones.
Ultimately, the journey CareFirst has been on is a powerful reminder that a superior total experience is not the result of a single campaign or a new piece of technology. It is the cumulative effect of a thousand operational decisions, all aligned around a common mission. It requires reframing experience from a marketing metric to an organizational principle, building a shared language of success that includes the entire business, and relentlessly focusing on empowering the employees who deliver the brand promise every single day. For marketing leaders, the path forward isn’t just about owning the customer journey; it’s about influencing the entire ecosystem that creates it. That is the true expert mode.
