The Evolution Of Workplace Benefits

Integrated benefits experiences are opening up new possibilities

by Kevin McNamara

In the last 25 years, we’ve witnessed an evolution in workplace benefits technology and the customer experience it drives. Gone are the mountains of paperwork required for even simple plan changes. Even the most basic digital-enrollment experience is a thing of the past. Now all but the smallest employers have adopted integrated benefits technology to unify enrollment and automate payroll deductions.

Advisors have evolved, too. They’ve gone from being hands-off with benefits technology to fully embracing and supporting it for customers on certain platforms.

But a bigger change is under way. And it will lead to new ways of streamlining benefits administration and affect decision making.

Time Crunch In The AI Era

To put things in perspective, think of the speed at which consumers have changed the way they research and make purchasing decisions. Blazing-fast smartphones and computers replaced slow desktops. Consumers became experts at online searches, knowing the perfect set of keywords to get to the information they were looking for.

Now AI allows users to merely ask a question and get an answer. Consumers are changing their expectations of what’s possible and even what’s acceptable. When you consider how expectations influence the employee and employer benefits experience, they’ll both want substantially faster ways to get critical information at the right time.

Against this backdrop of speed and efficiency, deciding whether to enroll in a benefit is rarely an easy decision. The average employee takes into consideration a broad range of factors like affordability, out-of-pocket medical costs, changes involving dependent family members and retirement aspirations.

Studies show, however, that most employees don’t give benefits decisions the time they deserve. This is happening despite the potential financial implications of each decision. They’re crunched for time because they’re juggling their enrollment event with other job duties and personal obligations.

Looking For Advice

It’s not like average consumers don’t already take advantage of intelligent purchase guidance in other areas of their lives. When they shop online, they interact with the technology of shopping giants that can predict their needs and make recommendations for what to add to the shopping cart.

But some consumers draw the line on purchases of a certain financial significance, like workplace benefits. They still want advice from more trusted sources or human experts.

Insurance professionals, with their deep knowledge, can act as advisors to consumers. But there aren’t enough of them to scale to the whole workforce. Plus, the time problem is still a barrier. The best digital benefits decision-support tools and enrollment advisors mix personal questions with available data before providing guidance — and that takes time.

For HR decision-makers, achieving a comprehensive, competitive benefits portfolio is highly dependent on informed support and data. They often seek advisors with expertise in the market or the industry, which can help with benchmarking. Statistical benchmarking in benefit offerings, meanwhile, is evolving rapidly. The benefits technology industry is realizing the opportunity from data mining in their payroll and benefits systems, and they’re bringing new benchmarking data products to market. 

But data analysis and decision-making can be time-consuming for both HR and advisors. Like employees, they have limited time to weigh options. The siloed focus on benefit design and offerings is prioritized, always starting with medical. By the time voluntary benefits are discussed, there is only a short time left to make decisions.

Supplying advisors and HR decision-makers with the right data at the right time is easier than ever. But the time commitment to review an entire benefits portfolio still conflicts with benefits administration challenges and HR technology changes.

Prioritization Is The Solution

It’s clear that HR teams, advisors and customers need time back. And prioritization is the solution. We need to automate benefits administration wherever possible. Data integration is an enabler, not the whole solution. Customers need full orchestration, where people, technology and processes come together to streamline the entire benefits experience and help HR recoup time.

For example, think about the time required to manage Evidence of Insurability, or EOI, for life and disability benefits. In an orchestrated experience using application programming interface, or API, integrations, it can be seamless for employees and employers. Beyond data integration, an orchestrated EOI experience handles:

• Technology implementation support
• Notifications and reminders
• An intuitive application experience fed from enrollment
• Auto-adjudication of most applications
• Automated payroll deduction activation for approvals
• Error handling — or even better, the elimination of errors

When the full EOI experience is delivered, customers realize the greater potential. A recent internal study conducted by The Standard’s Total Experience team confirmed this. Customers who implemented the latest real-time integrated EOI solution within their human capital management system widely reported these benefits:

• Eliminates the wait time for manual processing
• Speeds up processing with fewer delays
• Reduces the risk of human errors
• Streamlines the employee experience, leading to fewer calls and questions to HR
• Builds excitement for future enhancements within their benefits technology platform
• Helps HR use time savings to focus on other priorities

The findings do more than prove the benefits of the API service for EOI. The sentiment of expanding the orchestration into the rest of the benefits journey is apparent. The next frontiers, like outsourced absence management, are transitioning from difficult data integration to an orchestrated and integrated experience.

Getting Over Implementation Hurdles

Advisors who highlight the benefits of integration and advocate moving forward must address customer concerns about the implementation effort required. HR teams may anticipate having to juggle other priorities with their benefits technology implementation. They may fear entering a space known for acronyms like API or dread the internal fight for project resources. Most HR decision-makers didn’t major in software engineering, so they lean on their company’s tech experts, who are in high demand on other priorities.

A splashy technology demonstration doesn’t build confidence that everything will be implemented smoothly. HR teams will remember “easy” tech changes that failed, so they seek guidance from their advisors. Leading advisors say references and experience with their customers ultimately give them and their customers confidence.

Fair enough, but nothing better or groundbreaking ever begins with a reference. Someone is always first. A sound approach balances experience with the quality of the technology, customer support model, detailed end-to-end experience and a roadmap of future capabilities or upgrades. Asking how easy it will be for a customer to integrate and adopt the next capability is smart. The answer may not always be “like flipping a light switch,” but if the return on investment in time savings is significant, investing time and effort is justified.

Expectations Continue To Evolve

The rate of change and innovation will only increase exponentially. We may see more improvements in the next five years than we’ve seen in the last 25. AI is helping organizations, both carriers and ben tech companies, develop new integrations and customer-facing solutions faster. Data integration is shifting from IT development to more business configurations. This will help reduce the implementation time barrier. 

What will customer adoption look like in the fast-changing benefits administration world? Employees are already evolving their expectations based on the digital experiences they have outside of work. The silos of benefits administration will start coming down. Advisors are helping HR make it a priority and changing their evaluation criteria. 

Advisors, meanwhile, don’t need to become true experts in benefits technology to drive change. They can help surface trends by setting the stage for insurance carriers and technology experts to showcase their solutions. They can help direct questions from customers to providers. Customer perspectives on the experiences of employees, HR administrators and, in the case of absence management, people managers are all relevant.

Upgrades in the benefits administration experience are coming faster and more often than ever before. Prioritizing how to give HR time back will bring the quality of the benefits offering back into focus. And better employee experiences will cascade from many of the same upgrades, giving employees better ways to make informed decisions.