Employers today are under pressure to deliver solid and connected benefits experiences that support employees to maximize their health and financial wellness. More than ever, this requires a clear understanding of what “service excellence” means in a modern benefits program.
As a broker, being able to support your employer groups to build, administer and enable an outstanding benefits experience despite cost and complexity challenges can be a huge differentiator. This article explains what service excellence means in benefits administration — and how brokers can help employers achieve and maintain it with the right partners.
Service Excellence in Benefits Administration
Service excellence means consistently meeting (and, preferably, exceeding) customer expectations throughout the benefits lifecycle. Not so long ago, delivering service excellence meant offering a range of benefits and basic, transactional support. Today, thanks largely to digital technology and its impact of consumer experiences across employees’ lives, employees expect more from their employee benefits experiences:
- A broader array of health and voluntary benefits.
- The ability to manage their benefits via a connected technology experience.
- Personalized guidance to help them choose and use benefits effectively.
In short, they want an experience as seamless and convenient as other aspects of their lives, like entertainment or shopping, using their preferred channels.
What Challenges Do Employers Face?
Most employers aim to deliver an outstanding benefits experience, seeing it as a competitive advantage in attracting and retaining talent while helping to keep employees happy, healthy and productive. However, challenges may stand in the way, such as:
- Program complexity. With a growing array of health and voluntary benefits, employees have more options and more to manage, making the work of serving the benefits lifecycle more complex.
- Administrative burden. HR and benefits teams are often overwhelmed by the administrative demands of maintaining a comprehensive benefits program, making it difficult to provide consistent, high-quality service, especially when one-on-one support is needed.
- Rising healthcare costs. As health care costs continue to rise, employers are under pressure to ensure every dollar spent on benefits delivers clear ROI, and employees face a range of challenges that have the potential to impact their benefits experiences and the levels of service they require.
To overcome these and free up HR resources for more strategic work, employers need help. Partnering with a broker that understands service excellence — and guides the employer towards suitable technology and support — makes it possible to deliver a benefits experience that meets or exceeds employee expectations while controlling costs and reducing the administrative burden.
Creating an Outstanding Benefits Experience
In the not-so-distant past, showcasing a comprehensive benefits program might have meant issuing a paper benefits guide. Today, employees expect a more personalized (and digital!) benefits experience tailored to their needs, life events and circumstances.
This level of personalization requires data and technology to more effectively tailor experiences and proactively address employee needs and deliver timely, relevant support. For instance, after knee surgery, an employee might receive targeted content on rehabilitation and be directed to a tool to help them find in-network care providers.
This approach can benefit employers and employees by helping to maximize ROI and promote optimal health outcomes. It can also foster a happy, healthy workforce that feels valued, performs at its best, and helps reduce costs from poor or delayed care decisions.
The Role of a Benefits Administration Partner
The role of a benefits administration partner is to deliver excellent service to three audiences:
1) The employer’s HR team
HR teams are the primary customers of a benefits administration partner, and they should expect top-tier service. This includes technology aligning with their goals and human support when needed, to help:
- Reduce manual workload at every step, from enrollment and decision support to employee guidance, data collection and point solution management.
- Aid in strategic decision-making, such as selecting benefits, understanding employee needs and assessing ROI for various solutions.
- Maximize ROI by helping to ensure every dollar spent on benefits and initiatives is driven by employee engagement and delivers tangible value.
2) The employee population
Covered employees are the ultimate customers of a benefits program. The benefits administration partner plays a crucial role in delivering an exceptional benefits experience that attracts and retains talent while enhancing the overall impact of the employer's benefits program in terms of ROI and employee wellbeing.
This support includes:
- Providing an outstanding digital benefits experience that makes it easy and convenient for employees to choose, use, and manage benefits through their preferred channels.
- Offering personalized, real-time guidance and prompts tailored to the employee's unique needs, preferences, and life stage to help them optimize health, wealth and wellness outcomes.
- Ensuring accessible human support from benefits and customer service experts to assist employees with complex challenges and concerns.
3) The broker
A benefits administration partner can provide the insights and data — but there’s no substitute for a broker’s hard-won benefits expertise. The presence of the benefits administration partner’s technology and infrastructure can help brokers deliver even more value to their clients, including by:
- Advising employers on which benefits and point solutions to offer and how to evaluate their effectiveness over time.
- Helping HR teams understand their employee populations, their needs and how to administer a benefits program that evolves with the needs of the employees it serves.
- Supporting employers to minimize administrative overheads and maximize the ROI of dollars spent on their benefits programs.
Helping Your Clients Measure Service Excellence
Two key factors measure service excellence:
- Consistently meeting or exceeding service delivery metrics, such as uptime, response times and query resolution.
- Receiving strong, positive feedback from customers.
These two elements are closely connected. Strong service delivery usually leads to better customer feedback, but even with high service metrics, poor user experience can result in negative feedback.
As technology advances, service delivery will increasingly rely on automated, metric-based assessments, while customer feedback will be collected through digital surveys and ratings. Despite the importance of metrics like transaction accuracy and satisfaction scores, the human element — anecdotal feedback from various sources — remains vital.
Balancing quantitative metrics with real-world feedback is essential for achieving true service excellence. If there's a discrepancy between metrics and human feedback, prioritize the latter to ensure customer satisfaction. When both align, you have a benefits program that delivers an exceptional experience.
For brokers, there’s a clear opportunity to help employers understand program metrics and employee feedback to create a continual feedback and improvement loop. Once again, a benefits administration partner can provide the data and insights — but there’s no substitute for a broker’s expertise in interpreting and acting on data and feedback to enhance the benefits experience.
Outstanding Experiences Begin with Understanding the End User
At Benefitfocus, we help organizations make better decisions about the benefits they offer, and support employees to choose and use their benefits optimally to maximize their health and financial outcomes. In other words, we support an optimal employee experience.
Some of the benefits include:
- Our technology platform simplifies administration, drives efficiencies and enables organizations to focus on what’s most important.
- We help employees make smarter benefits decisions through a connected experience across health, retirement and savings.
- We support better health and financial outcomes through powerful insights and a personalized experience that engages employees year-round.
If you think your customers may be interested in these outcomes, find out more.
To learn more about assessing the right service and support model for your organization, download the guide Expecting Service Excellence from Your Benefits Administration Partner.
