160 - Transforming Health Insurance with a Customer-Centric Software with HealthBird's Irena Tigranyan

Welcome to Listening with Leaders. I'm Doug Noll, lawyer turned peacemaker. I teach executive leaders how to listen to emotions rather than words so that they can become the leaders everyone wants to follow. And I teach those same leaders how to be authentically present, available, and connected to their families despite being insanely busy. I have learned that we are 98% emotional and only 2% rational. Learning how to listen to emotions is, in my experience, the foundational skill of life. Stick around to the end of the show, and I'll reveal how you can be on our next guest in 15 to 20 minutes. So let's get started. Irina Tigranyan, welcome to Listening with Leaders. You're the Chief Operating Officer and co-founder of a really interesting startup called Healthbird.com. I'm really interested in learning more about that and learning about you. So thanks for taking time out to talk with me today.

Of course, Doug. It's great to, to be here. Very excited. I look forward to the conversation.

Thanks. We were talking a little bit before we came on that you are a native Armenian and immigrated to this country 10 years ago. Tell us a little bit about your backstory.

Yeah, I was born in the small country of Armenia, and actually every Armenian is, is very proud where they come from. So whenever we get a chance to tell our, you know, in the conversation where we're coming from, that we're Armenians and that Armenia was the first country to accept Christianity as an official religion. You know, those interesting facts we always get to share. But I was born not too long after Soviet Union collapsed, and it was a very difficult time for my parents. Of course, I don't remember, but as my mom was telling, there were no food, no hot water. No electricity, and it was just a rough time. And my parents are doctors, so they were offered an opportunity to move to Russia and to start a career there. They were very young, younger than how old I am right today, but they, um, they moved to Moscow. So I grew up for the most of my life, I grew up in Moscow. And in 2014, we won a green card and we wanted to, to come to America and to see what's, what's here, what is happening. Because living in Armenia and Russia, we always thought of America and Americans as just this dream, right? There is just something that's always sunny, it's always great. And, um, when we moved, to be honest, I can say, like, living in different countries, different cities, the best country in the world. I truly love, uh, I truly love US. And everywhere I go, I'm always excited to come back, even though I love my homeland, I love Moscow. But this is the country that gives you so many opportunities to actually make your dream come true.

Wow.

Come to be your reality.

Yeah. So, so the dream did come true for you, didn't it?

It did in a very, um, I would say unexpected way, but it did. I didn't expect to be in health insurance space. I started my tech, um, career with Tesla, with Lucid Motors, and with a couple of startups. But they were more product-oriented. And when I met my husband through an app called Bumble, it's a dating app, we met, we matched, and then we went on a couple of dates, and it was just clear to us that we, we actually matched and we are really good combination. After we got married, we decided we don't want the wedding, we don't want the honeymoon, we want to start a company and change the way people, um, access and utilize health insurance.

So is your, is your husband your co-founder with you in Healthbird?

He's actually the CEO.

Yeah, he's the CEO and you're the CEO. So tell us a little bit about how you conceptualized Healthbird.

So he is coming from health insurance space. I think that was the most important part here. It's not easy just to decide to start a company within this space because the industry is so regulated on the federal level, state level. Insurance carriers level. So there are just so many moving parts that not anyone can actually just decide and do it. So we got very, I think, fortunate that he had the experience and also he brought the team that had the experience. And the main goal for us, it was how come there is so many, you know, there's so many possibilities of solve your problems sitting on the couch and doing it over, you know, on your phone. But when it comes to important decisions that impact, let's say, an entire year of your life, you, you don't have a very easy, effortless, intuitive way of doing so. And I was always working at big corporations, getting my health insurance through the companies. So I was not necessarily facing the experiences that gig economy workers had, contractors, freelancers would experience. And then when we were having conversations, it's like, yeah, you gotta call someone and you just need to provide their Social Security to them. And I told them one of the first things that I learned when I moved to, to US is you never want to give your Social Security over the phone or email or text message. How do people do that? And after conversations, we realized that there is a need to bring in a product that serves not only to make the process easier, but also helps people utilize the insurance that they got, understand the insurance that they got. And that's when we just decided to postpone everything that we had, leave the full-time jobs and just focus on building Healthbird.

Wow. So what— so now you're 2 years into the project and it's been successful. You're making money. What is it that gets you up in the morning these days to go to work? What gets you excited?

Um, the product, even though we've been in the industry, I would say for, for 2 years, but technically, November of last year, it marked only 1 year of us being customer-facing. So there's still so many things to do. We launched our app, which helps the members that purchase health insurance through us to utilize insurance, with features like booking doctor's appointments, manage their medications, have RX cards, and so forth. We offer that as a benefit to use our services when it comes to signing up for health insurance. But launching an app is not just like you come up with an idea, you sit down with your engineers, and that's it, everything is done. It's a constant improvement. And we started recently doing customer interviews where we just bring in just, you know, regular individuals who would be using our app. And we just give them the app and we observe what are the gestures that you, you know, make. Is it intuitive enough? And believe it or not, the findings that we are discovering throughout those interviews are just incredible. We thought we released the product and it's great. It's not as intuitive. There's so many improvements that we could be making. So I think that What gets me excited, especially the last 7-8 months when we actually started seeing true success, true impact on the customers' lives, right? So they are reaching out to us and they're saying, wow guys, this is really good, or I went to my doctor's appointment, I knew exactly what I needed to do, or I have all the information at my fingertips. So that feedback is really driving us forward.

Wow, great. And is your company— how is your company organized? Are you guys all remote, hybrid, or do you have actual physical bricks and mortar space?

Yeah, it was the first probably 2 months when we were fully remote, but then we realized we have to have a space because you can't really build a company when everyone's just doing their own things. Yes. And What we did is we got a warehouse and just a true warehouse. I think they were storing some car tires before or something like that. So we got a good deal on that. And we didn't launch the product at the time yet. So it was pre-revenue. People didn't really know about us. And we did everything. Like I was painting the walls. Ariel, my CEO, was just like putting the glass with our contractors. So it was building everything for us to go there, sit down and have conversations, come up with ideas because we want to keep the startup mentality by coming up with ideas, testing and executing fast. And then if it's not a successful idea, if we failed in certain places, then we just fail fast. We don't say then come to contemplate over what went wrong. Why did we do it? Whose fault is that? It's just like quick execution.

I was gonna say, it sounds like you're following the lean model.

Yeah, yeah, it's just very, very fast, very low amount of, you know, just recycle whatever thoughts you have.

Get your marginal, get your minimum viable product out there, see if it works. If it works, continue with it. If it doesn't, then go on to something else.

Exactly. Yeah, exactly. And then we got the space. Now we moved to a new office. So I'm actually in my office sitting. We have a beautiful backyard that we built for our team just to go outside, you know, be a little bit active. The Bay, and it's been going super well.

Good for you. So what, you know, you've got, you had several years at Tesla and Lucid and other companies. What is it that you think is unique that you bring to the table that makes Healthbird so successful?

I think the fact that I've worked, when I just moved to US, I actually didn't move here with, with knowing the language. I didn't speak English. So what, uh, what I decided to do is to go directly to one of the most physically demanding industries where you have to speak, you have to communicate. And I worked as a hostess at the restaurant. And, uh, it was, to be honest, it was extremely stressful experience, uh, because I realized that I don't want to mess with hungry people, uh, because they, they don't want to hear anything, but they want the food that they ordered. So But the fact that I started at a level where I wasn't carrying a title, right? So I really knew how demanding the job can be. It's not only mental, it's also physical. And then after that, I worked at the hospital helping them with their billing departments and running the schedules for doctors and registered nurses and so forth. And then moving to Tesla, working in sales and marketing. I think just encompassing all the experiences that I've had in the past, bringing it to Healthbird, it helps me to see from every customer's standpoint to understand what their need would be in terms of like what they're dealing on a day-to-day basis.

So, so interesting that you came to the country from Russia not speaking a word of English and you had to do a crash course, right? To learn what is a very difficult language if you're not native to it. And you speak perfect English.

Thank you.

And I think what I'm hearing is that gave you empathy for the customer.

It's not easy when you have a full-time job. If you're alone, it's way harder when you have to juggle multiple jobs. You have a family to take care of. You need to take care of your family, maybe back home. It's tough to be in, you know, in certain situations, but at the same time, I think that's one of the things that I mentioned is living in this country, living in the US, it's hard, but it's possible. You have all the opportunities to make it work and all the startups that are coming up. For example, even our company, we have a program that's called Ambassador Program to spread the word about Healthbird. We pay a conversion fee. So if people are telling their friends and family, they're referring them to us, we're happy to incentivize them to continue doing so. Right. There are just so many opportunities to, to keep it forward.

Excellent. And so this show is called Listening with Leaders. And as you probably know, I teach people how to listen very deeply, teach people how to listen to emotions, which has all kinds of benefits. I'm curious, um, how important has listening been in the years that you've been working in your career?

I think I realized that it's kind of like I can answer this on both ways, but I realized that listening to people that you work with is extremely important, but also listening to yourself, where you are. And, uh, what is, especially when it comes to building a company, your stress level. And it was not too long ago when I caught myself that I am getting to the point where, where I'm, I'm not losing the interest, but I'm not having the same level of creativity. And I started asking myself, just simply sitting in the room, what is going on? Why do I feel frustrated? Why I don't want to take new projects? What is going on? And I realized that there's just so many things are going through my mind. Waking up in the morning, I don't have clear head. Going to bed, I don't have clear head. And I started taking meditations more seriously, just in the morning, 5 minutes. And I truly noticed the difference by listening to your needs, listening to your body. If you have a little bit of a tension doing that exercise, and if you don't have clear mind, Meditating, taking, you know, 2 minutes and going outside, taking a walk and taking a deep breath in, you know, resetting. That is extremely important just to keep you going, not to slow you down. By taking 5 minutes, you're not, you're not taking a step back, but it is going to help you take multiple steps forward.

So one of the lessons you've learned is to listen to yourself. And pay attention to your own self-care so that you can continue to be creative and productive going forward. You have— I think I noticed on the website that you have agents or people who can respond to chats or inquiries that customers have. How do you train them to listen?

Yeah, we have our member concierge team. So what we decided to do is to bring in extremely friendly, nice, great individuals that are just looking to to get answers for themselves because they are, you know, they're entering to the point of life where they are adulting, right? We're bringing relatively young individuals out of college that are just curious to learn, to see what's out there in terms of the careers. And what's important for us is to, we have a full training set up for 2 weeks every time we onboard someone, is to understand that if we're going to get inquiries from customers, there are going to be frustrated customers. They are not frustrated with you. They are not frustrated maybe with Healthbird. They are frustrated with, within the situation that they're in. And what's important to do is to try to understand, to try to listen to them, because sometimes people just want to have someone to, to hear them out. And even if we are not able to solve their problem, we can direct them to the appropriate party, to the phone number, email, or maybe we can build a, you know, a quick email. These are the next steps you would like to do. So one of the recent conversations I've had with someone in my team is just when someone is reaching out to us saying, I need health insurance, we don't need to respond to them with this big message saying that we are very happy that you're here. Healthbird supports you. People don't care about that, right? As much as we would like to welcome them to our site and welcome them as member, their main concern is I need health insurance immediately. How long is it going to take and how much is that going to cost? So let's start addressing by those answers and letting them know that we're here if there are any additional help needed.

That's great. I mean, so it strikes me that what your people will do is say somebody says I need health insurance and you said great. Tell me more. Yes, that's all they say. Tell me more. Tell me what's going on. Open-ended question. And then they listen and they listen and they listen. Have they ever— have they been taught how to listen to emotions, or are they just— or is that just something that some people have and other people don't have?

Uh, they do frequently experience customers that are very upset, so certainly that is something that we, we walk them through. We actually have a very thorough process, not only from the compliance standpoint of having recorded lines, but also for our internal training purposes, to listen to the conversations within the group of team within the same department and pausing every, I want to say like 15 to 20 seconds of the conversation and what could have been done better. What is it that the customer mentioned to us that we didn't hear? Or what is it? How many times did we ask the question that the customer already answered? Or how many times customer came back to us with the same problem, with the same question? So by having the team noticing and mentioning things to each other, we found that it's much more impactful because they seem to be helping each other and they seem to be understanding why the training is important and why the listening to customers' concerns are important.

Wow, that sounds really terrific. That's a great process. And does this kind of roundtable review happen very often?

Very often. Yeah, we try to do it every quarter. We are, we are not, we are bringing new team members, I want to say every quarter. So it kind of like aligns perfectly. But we try to do it as many times as possible. And very frequently, we don't treat training as just like, it's just a onboarding 2 weeks that you do and that's it, you're on your own. We actually try, we try to do it on a one-on-one basis. I very frequently just do shadowing when I just sit down next to my experts and I just listen to the conversations. I try to understand the customer's perspective. I try to recognize what are the better ways we can introduce our product that way customer clicks. Maybe there is someone who mentioned, oh, I have a big family, right? And for me, there's just so much paperwork. And one of the things that Healthbird offers is you see all your insurance cards in one place, right? So having mentioned that benefit to them, maybe it will be like, oh, it's so much easier now. I don't have to stress about all the mail coming through, me keeping everything and going to the doctors with all these members cards and so forth.

Very cool. Well, it sounds like you're, you're on a great trajectory. Where do you see yourself going with Healthbird over the next 5 years?

I always mention this, and I don't know how that sounds, but like, I still, I still like the idea. So I want Healthbird to become a verb. What I mean by that is I want, how, whenever you're planning a trip, right, you want to go from your house to your friend's house, you don't say, I'm going to go outside and get a car and get there. You're just saying, I'm gonna Uber there. So when it comes to searching something on the internet, you're just Googling it. So what I want for my company to be is to become the verb for whenever it comes to not only health insurance but everything insurance related, everything healthcare related, that people know that we are reliable and we are there for them to, uh, to solve their questions, and we're there to be the solution.

So we're going to help root it.

Exactly.

Good for you. One more question, Irina. What's one thing about yourself that we would never know unless you revealed it to us?

Oi, um, it's very hard for me to, um, let me— I'm just translating from, from one of the languages that I speak, but it's very hard for me to, uh, understand slang.

Oh, really? Yeah, yeah.

So some, especially early on, I remember it just like it was yesterday when my manager— I was at the restaurant working, my manager came up to me and he's like, you're cut. And I'm looking at him, I'm not. He's like, yeah, you're cut. And he's making this gesture. I'm like, I don't know, what, what did I do? He's like, go home, you're cut from your shift. Like, oh, is that what it means? And after that, I, I would always pause and people can look at my face and like, you didn't understand what I said, right? No. So that's, that's one of the things that I'm still 10 years after still learning.

But you're not afraid to ask people, um, English is my fourth language or my third language. So what does that mean?

Yeah, for me, it's, you know, it's here in Russia because when I moved, I also didn't speak Russian. And they were also— Russian language is also very complicated, complicated language. And if you speak, if it's not the proper way that you speak, people look weirdly at you. People don't like that. So when we moved here, when people started telling me, just speak, people don't really care whether you said it grammatically, where you said it, she have or she has, they will understand you and they will do their best to help answer to your question. That's when I realized that, okay, it doesn't matter, I just need to start speaking. And honestly, that I give that advice to everyone who is learning. We actually have a couple of team members who speak mostly Spanish, but I don't speak Spanish, I speak obviously English, and they're doing their best to speak with me in English and they always say, 'I'm sorry, I'm sorry.' I'm just like, don't apologize. As long as you're making the effort to, to communicate, that's all that matters. Excellent.

Wow. Well, this has been a great conversation, Irene. I really appreciate your time. Thank you so much.

Of course. Thank you so much for having me.

You're welcome. Doug Noll here. Thank you so much for listening to Listening with Leaders. If you are a successful executive leader who would like to be on this program, please visit podcast.dougnull.com/podcast. If you got something out of this interview, would you please share this episode on social media? Just do a quick screenshot with your phone and text it to a friend or post it on the socials. If you know someone that would be a great guests, tag them on the social media to let them know about the show and include the hashtag #ListeningWithLeaders. I love seeing your posts and guest suggestions. We are regularly putting out new episodes and content. To make sure you don't miss any episodes, go ahead and subscribe. Your thumbs up ratings and reviews go a long way to help promote the show and mean a lot to me and my team. Want to know more? Go to my website, DougNoll.com, or Follow me on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram. That's @DouglasEnoll. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you on the next show.