How to Improve Employee Benefits Utilization with Mobile

For the key to improving employee benefits utilization, look to your phone.

Think about the last time you used your benefits. How were you feeling at that moment? Were you excited about embarking on a new journey, like having a baby? Nervous as you went in for a milestone procedure for the first time, like a colonoscopy or mammogram? Or perhaps you felt frazzled because your child was running a fever, and you were debating between going to the ER or waiting to see if you could get an appointment at the pediatrician’s the next day.

These highly emotional moments happen to your employees every day. And their feelings in that moment contribute to how they put their benefits to work. Anticipating these moments is what my team centers our research and design around. Ensuring that the experiences we create within our platform help ease their emotions and deliver an experience that instills confidence in them. Helping them use their benefits in the best way according to their situation.

Reducing friction for a better employee benefits experience

It’s estimated that 92% of Americans own a smartphone in 2024. With internet usage on mobile devices surpassing desktop internet access, it makes sense that people turn to their phones as the first place they look for information.  

Benefits should be no different, and it’s important to align your employee’s need for convenience with their need to better understand how to use their benefits in moments that matter. What we’ve found through extensive research by our team of UX experts, is it’s common for employees to feel overwhelmed by the plethora of choices and complex information. So, we’ve given our own mobile app a refresh to its design according to our findings from user experience research data.  

It’s impossible to read employee’s minds, but empathetic understanding of the emotional journey of employees can help us get a little closer. And based on those journeys, optimizing for the best way to guide them through the intricacies of health and financial wellbeing. Our innovative redesign primarily focuses on demystifying this complexity through:

• Simple and intuitive navigation: What is it about benefits that makes them so complex? When you take the time to understand the root cause of your population’s confusion, you can begin to address the challenges that employees are facing when navigating their benefits. With a simplified interface scaled through extensive user testing, the app offers a straightforward pathway to essential benefits details, account balances, and personalized recommendations.
• Personalized benefit program activation: When we talk about employee benefits utilization, we want to understand how you can get your employees to use the benefits you offer them. Sending out personalized recommendations for valuable but often overlooked programs is one way. And even more impactful, Sofia, our AI-powered personal benefits assistant, is always at the forefront of our UI, helping address millions of employee’s questions in real-time, and heightening the responsive nature of the app. 
• Optimized information delivery: We know that part of the problem with employee benefits is information overload. When there’s too much distraction, it’s easy to get lost. In technical terms, we call the solution to this reducing cognitive burden. This means that we optimize individual pages for a coherent, streamlined view. This allows employees to concentrate more effectively on the content they need to see.

All this to say that making these changes allows for a frictionless, easier way for employees to navigate the system, and ultimately activate on their benefits.

Focusing on employee benefits for financial wellbeing

Your employees are more concerned than ever about their finances. Which means that it’s on HR and benefits leaders to make sure employees fully understand their total paychecks. Another key learning through our research was that across Businessolver’s book of business, employees who have an HSA or FSA through our proprietary MyChoice Accounts solution, were power users of our mobile application. MyChoice Accounts members went to the mobile app up to seven times a month to review their balances and better understand their financial picture.

The increase in app usage presents a huge opportunity for our MyChoice Accounts clients to capture employee’s increased attention and further educate them on their full financial picture. Armed with this information, our redesign efforts included elevating the consumer account experience. This opened new opportunities to drive engagement to other point solutions and benefits such as telemedicine or care management. In fact, our data proved that when an employee logged into our mobile app, we saw increases in utilization of benefit programs like:

1. Provider guidance
2. Care navigation
3. EAP
4. Telemedicine
5. MSK
6. Wellness
7. Diabetes

This digital transformation resonated very positively in user testing outcomes, signaling a notable 40% improvement in FSA or HSA claim management within the redesigned app layout.

A balanced innovation

In this new era of AI, where the human element can sometimes get lost in the emphasis to keep driving digital efficiencies, Businessolver’s benefits mobile app stands out as a beacon of balanced innovation. It is through understanding and responding to the emotional undercurrents of employee experiences that technology can deliver the best possible service and benefits delivery. And as a result, employers can expect to see a surge in benefits engagement and satisfaction, contributing to the overall health and productivity of their workforce.

Make sure your MyChoice Benefits app is updated to the latest version to see the new experience! Apple App Store Google Play Store

Engaging your employees throughout the year with innovative and intuitive technology that meets them in moments that matter is what we call Tech with Heart. Take a look at our methodology.