ROI isn’t just about saving dollars and cents. It’s about saving time, reducing confusion, and increasing trust, confidence, and satisfaction. As healthcare costs continue to rise, HR teams are being tasked to do more with less—and prove the value behind it.
HR is usually viewed as the organization’s cost center—payroll, medical spend, recruitment, benefits tech. There’s a lot on the balance sheet! Cost management isn’t just about slashing spend anymore. HR needs to prove the value of what’s being spent and how it’s paying off long-term for the business.
Our 2025 Benefits Insights report unpacks HR’s modern KPIs, showing that when HR has the right technology and tools in play, they can measure savings and results in real time.
Curious about where those value stories live (or should live) in your current tech stack? Let’s unpack it.
1. Dollars Saved Through Automation
Dependent verification, answering benefits questions, manual enrollment… these small tasks can add up to hundreds of hours of everyone’s time.
Automation tools, like AI, can help by handling administrative functions, answering benefits questions, and guiding employees towards their benefit options. These tools are helping HR recoup up to 4,000 hours of their time back, which translates to about $3,000,000 in work being handled by AI.
That frees up HR to focus on more strategic priorities (and even take a real lunch break?) and often helps employees avoid having to call or email in for help.
Quick quiz: Does your current benefits administration technology take work off your desk or add to it?
What to evaluate your tech on:
If not, that’s low-hanging ROI waiting to be captured!
2. Engagement Beyond Enrollment
Employee engagement tops the list of every HR person we talk to—and for good reason. When employees are engaged, they’re more productive, happy, and present. When benefits feel personal and are easy to access, employees are more likely to stay engaged year-round.
Employees who receive personalized reminders are 18% more likely to activate benefits and platform logins jump 28% higher when Total Rewards is integrated.
Quick quiz: Does your benefits administration technology support employees after enrollment?
What to evaluate your tech on:
3. Right-Fit Steerage and Enrollment
Employees will never be benefits experts—and they shouldn’t have to be to make confident and informed decisions at enrollment.
When employees use our decision support tool at enrollment, they’re 129% more likely to pair an HSA with an HDHP, helping them protect more of their paycheck by taking full advantage of the benefits available to them.
And that’s not all-employers also see benefits by way of cost avoidance through under- or over-insured employees. By our calculations, that could be up a$3,000,000 in premium spend control alone for an employer with 11,000 employees.
Quick quiz: Are you still doing paper-based plan comparisons for your workforce?
What to evaluate your tech on:
4. Service Center Sentiment and Speed
Raise your hand if you’ve ever been happy about having to call in for support.
Yeah, us either.
But when the call experience is expert, empathetic, and efficient, it can erase all of that frustration.
For us that looks like:
The results? 91% resolution rate, 72 NPS, and an 88 “Kindness Score” from AI sentiment analysis. The ROI of empathy is real. Faster, more positive resolutions reduce frustration — and HR’s workload.
Quick quiz: Do you have full insight into your employees’ benefits service experience and trending issues?
What to evaluate your tech on:
5. Full access to your data and insights
Data analyst is one of the many hats HR has to wear now. But you can’t manage what you can’t measure.
Our AI-powered Benefits Insights dashboards put real-time insights at HR’s fingertips, helping everyone from the Benefits Manager to the CHRO drill into key insights like engagement, issue trends, utilization, and a lot more. All without needing a full-time data scientist on staff.
Quick quiz: Can you view insights, trends, and analytics whenever you want in your platform? Is it available to you in real time?
What to evaluate your tech on:
Let’s tally up your “Yes” answers:
5 out of 5: You’re an ROI Rockstar.
You’re driving measurable value out of your benefits strategy, turning automation and analytics into powerful proof points to keep your benefits program on track to deliver on your business goals AND your people objectives.
3 to 4 out of 5: Solid foundation, ready for optimization.
You’re capturing some key ROI metrics, but there’s room to level up. Look for ways to integrate automation, data dashboards, or sentiment tracking so you can tell a stronger value story next budget season.
Check out the Benefits Insights report for a deeper dive on these KPIs.
0-2 out of 5: You’re headed in the right direction.
If your platform isn’t showing results in real time—or if you’re still relying on spreadsheets and year-end reports—it might be time to re-evaluate your tech stack. Many HR teams are in the same spot. Start small: identify one KPI to measure (like cost avoidance or engagement) and build from there. Once you have the right tech in place, you’ll see ROI multiply across every metric that matters.
