How could Skandia improve their communication to make the customers feel good about a doctors appointment?

In my previous post I wrote about the anger I felt about Skandia calling me fat and asking me to do a health check based on the completely useless measurement BMI. Now lets see how could Skandia turn this feeling of rage to something positive with some easy UX magic shall we?

So, Skandia did not do so well with their pretty straight forward request that I should get a doctor to sign off that I am in decent shape and do not pose a risk of dying anytime soon. Looking at others response this is not unique to me, so it is an issue for Skandia that I'll try to give some ideas on how to fix by just changing the copy.

"Hi, thank you for choosing Skandia. Because your BMI is above 30 we ask that you take a small check with a doctor. If you want you can save the receipt and we will reimburse the cost to you."

The quote is not exact, but as you can see some effort have been made to be as polite as possible, but still the wording pretty much say "we use a tool that inaccurately attempt to measure how fat you are and based on that we thing you are obese and need a doctor to tell us you will not die instantly costing us money".

That is a pretty bad message because if you do not consider yourself fat you will get insulted, if you are overweight you get angry because you do not want to have that thrown in your face and finally if you like me really, really are against the abuse of BMI as any form of measurement tools you will really get under their skin.

So, regardless if you use BMI or not your aim is to make the potential customer feel like this is for her benefit and just routine. You do not want to bring attention to whatever their weight situation is or tell them they got specially selected as being fat. So lets see if we can bring this same message, but turning it to a positive message instead:

Hi Jimi, we are very happy that you chose Skandia to be your company of choice for your life insurance policy. As your health is important to us we would like to ask you to book an appointment with a doctor just to make sure no hidden problems with your health exist. We will of course pay for this visit and should you have any questions regarding this, or anything else regarding our policies, please do not hesitate to contact us.

Maybe it's not the best text, but you get the idea. Instead of calling attention to a potential health issue Skandia ask us to make the check to make sure no hidden health issues exist. It turn the issue from being about Skandia wanting to be sure I am not a potential cost to be about then caring about my health and offer to pay to make sure it's ok. That's a pretty big change of tonality.

The assurance that they pay for the visit trigger a mild reciprocity effect and the offer to be there to answer questions enhance the tonality of caring. No indication if this is specifically for you or a general request exist which makes it less intrusive, so this works if it's sent out to all potential clients or just the potential obese ones.

It's a very simple change of wording that I pretty much just wrote on the fly, but with some proper copy anyone can turn any text and make it into a conversion machine instead of a conversion killer. It's all about how you talk to people, not what you actually ask them to do....