Personalizing the Employee Benefits Enrollment Experience

Maximizing Utilization and Confidence. What are you doing to combat employee benefit confusion?

Benefits confusion remains a common theme amongst employees of every generation. While those with more experience grow wiser, they still don’t have all the answers. On average, 86% of all employees are confused about their benefits. Benefits confusion has the potential to lead to mismatched enrollment and poor benefits utilization throughout the plan year.

However, a personalized enrollment experience can help employees stop this cycle and get off to a good start. According to MetLife’s 2023 Employee Benefit Trends Study, 54% of employees wished they had personalized benefit recommendations.

The power of personalization on the enrollment experience

Decision support at the time of enrollment may be the most impactful tool available to combat employee confusion and is a huge part of our personalized employee benefits enrollment experience. This single tool can intervene in what could be a suboptimal enrollment for the employee. And employees recognize how helpful it is!

When using Benefitsolver and our decision support tool to enroll, 80% of employees said they felt “very confident” or “extremely confident” in the benefits decisions they made, and 85% rated their enrollment experience as “good” or “excellent.” And those stats were prior to making our latest batch of enhancements to our enrollment experience and decision support tool. Now, there are even more opportunities to eliminate confusion and boost confidence.

Innovating the employee benefits enrollment experience

With the help of a quarter-million employee survey results following last year’s annual enrollment, Businessolver has once again improved our enrollment experience. We made these enhancements to simplify the employees’ enrollment experience while adding powerful tools to give them the information they needed to make the right decision for their situation.

• Making enrollment easier. For starters, we’ve improved visuals, terminology, and iconography to ensure the experience within our benefits technology reflects what employees have come to expect as consumers in their personal and professional lives. This enhancement includes simplifying directions, naming configurations, and updating icons throughout the experience to give them a more modern look and feel.
• Greater benefits impact. We’ve also enabled greater access to personalization and modeling tools that will ensure an employee is empowered to take control of their anticipated healthcare spend—meaning employees can quickly determine how much their plan will cost them. Plus, we’re giving them more visibility into the impact that their potential expenses will have on the benefits they elect.
• Understanding their financial responsibility. That’s not all we’re doing to help employees understand their healthcare costs, though. Our new financial impact tools highlight anticipated deductibles and out-of-pocket maximums. These tools will help employees get a better view of their anticipated costs per paycheck and throughout the year. Bringing this information to the forefront of the experience will help employees make sound financial decisions when electing benefits.
• Providing much-needed context. Finally, we’re introducing a long-anticipated feature that will enable the in-depth, side-by-side comparison of an employee’s current coverage with their new coverage options. This was a top-requested feature from our Annual Enrollment survey, and you can imagine why. This feature will enable employees to make a valuable comparison of the coverage they’ve had in the last year with what is now available to them, helping simplify the process of choosing a new plan.

Letting feedback guide the way

Client and employee feedback has always been critical to our technology roadmap and has been a guiding light in this most recent process. While many end-users praised the platform’s ease of use, we’ve also listened to their concerns. Rising costs are a universal challenge, and our approach has been to lean in, offering tools and resources that help employees navigate these waters with confidence. Through our research of behavioral economics, we’ve introduced other features like claims decision support and an enhanced search function, all while preparing these innovations designed to streamline the employee benefits enrollment experience.

Where do we go from here?

Innovation, research, and feedback have been the cornerstones of our transformative journey to delight. As we continue to refine and enhance the enrollment process, we remain focused on our goal: to empower employees with the knowledge and tools they need to make informed decisions about their benefits through personalization. The advancements we’ve introduced are more than just features—they are a testament to our dedication to improving the lives of the members on our platform through insight, understanding, and accessibility.

Read about our latest innovation in the full Press Release.

If you’re interested in benefits technology, you should check out the Benefits Pulse Vodcast—where we keep a beat on all things HR tech and employee benefits.