Only half of all employees are very confident that they made the right decisions during their last annual enrollment. Employers dread this time of the year in terms of the pressure of getting the enrolments captured and relaying them to vendors. They need to make sure they provide enrollment opportunities to every eligible employee during the open enrollment window while also ensuring that the changes effective for the next plan year are implemented, and thoroughly tested, before releasing the system to the entire workforce.

You may have complex plan designs and requirements that make for difficult ongoing management. The benefits system should be scalable and flexible enough to handle a rapidly changing environment of constant regulatory and legislative changes. Benefits administration plays a large role in the success of your strategy and a feature-rich, scalable, and robust technology platform is the cornerstone of Benefits management. The Benefits platform should effectively capture and transmit enrollment data required by different insurance vendors to process the benefits. Complex rules and scenarios related to benefits changes, eligibility, certification requirements, rates, and coverage calculations due to life events should get accurately transacted and reported to the benefits vendors.

Technology is changing the way we interact with the world. Therefore, your employee expectations are changing too. A well-designed and intuitive user interface providing an online participant experience on any device with a full range of self-service capabilities is the ‘new normal. Users should feel guided at every step regarding the Plans, Eligibility, Enrollment rules, and the cost of benefits elected by them. A system that supports automated, data-driven, personalized guidance to the employees all year round also plays a key role in promoting engagement. Employers should focus on communicating the relevance of the benefits packages they offer, including how those benefits can help in specific scenarios and events in employees’ lives. Employers can explain how supplemental and emerging benefits can secure you from the limitations of regular medical plans (like the ever-confusing coverage, copays, deductibles, service dates, billing dates, and so on) that can result in unexpected financial stress. The above is not possible without intuitive design and navigation.