How data analytics can help you reposition benefits offerings

As any scientist will tell you, digging into data can help identify trends, formulate and test new theories and enable understanding. The same is true when it comes to benefits planning for your clients.

Data analytics are beginning to be used in innovative ways that can make your job as a benefits brokers’ easier, helping you uncover insights to improve plan design, extend your reach and save costs for you and your clients. Most notably, as employers work to achieve better enrollment numbers, data analytics can help you define more effective benefit packages, making enrollment easier for employees and ensuring they take advantage of coverage options in a holistic way.

Related: Demystifying benefits spend: How data analytics can help

Think of it like Amazon’s “recommended for you” feature. A sophisticated set of algorithms is at work on the site, taking your purchase and viewing history and combining it with the purchase and viewing history of other shoppers like you, giving you tailored offerings. All that you see when you log in, however, is an interesting product or a newly released book by an author you already enjoy, ready for you to add to your shopping cart.

Similarly, with data analytics technology, you can use historical benefits data to better predict results and explain the rationale behind your recommended plan designs. For example, one organization looked at data around how many employees had hit their maximum dental coverage. After careful scrutiny, they decided to start offering a base dental plan, with a higher coverage option.

Using data that is de-identified at the point of collection, you can provide clients with evidence in the form of peer, industry and demographic analytics. This can show how an individual company compares to others in the industry, or peers of the same size in different industries, for example. In turn, this can help optimize an organization’s plan design and build a communication methodology and product positioning strategy to guide employees through the enrollment experience.

Strengthen your role as trusted advisor

As a broker, you are only as successful as the strength of your relationships with your clients. Business growth depends on your ability to serve as a trusted advisor to employers and help them create a cost-effective, robust benefits strategy that helps them retain employees in tight labor markets. In that sense, being able to advise clients based on data analytics is a game changer. With analytics, you can quantify your suggestions based on hard evidence, and therefore advise based on neutral data rather than mere opinion. It can strip away the emotion of a decision; in essence, “the data can set you free.” Serving in this capacity can differentiate your practice from other brokers in the market and further soldify your relationship with your clients.

Further, sharing new insights from available data can enable you to have more frequent interactions with your clients. Using data insights over time, you can provide outcomes to clients as they consult on changes to benefits, plan design options and enrollment percentages. Using analytics can also help you better understand the things that matter to your clients, ultimately saving time as you create a stronger rapport based on high-touch support.

Related: The future of health care is analytics, but…

Another benefit of using data analytics? The ability to increase your offerings in the small- and medium-sized business market to reach more clients. Within this sector, having a scalable and repeatable consultative model is critical to success. Being able to slice and analyze data can help you build benefits packages that can serve as an “out-of-the-box” solution capable of being repurposed to meet the needs of most businesses, while freeing you to customize plans as needed for those employers who need it.

Refine your offerings, tailor your plan designs to employers’ needs

Armed with objective information, you and your clients can refine your offerings, setting up tailored plans that range from high coverage and low risk to low coverage and high risk, while effectively packaging health, dental, vision, life, HSA/FSA contributions, critical illness, disability, and/or accident coverage based on the combination of options employees need.

Since 95 percent of HR professionals say health care benefits are the most important benefit they can offer employees, providing a range of options and helping employees understand the implications of their selections is critical to increasing enrollment. That said, data analytics can also be used to help employers strengthen their communication and enrollment campaigns to raise awareness and provide education to employees.

Another example: One professional employer organization noticed a high percentage of emergency room (ER) claims for non-emergent conditions. Consequently, it launched an ongoing campaign to educate employees about when to use the ER, when to go to urgent care and when to make appointments with a physician’s office — as well as the effect of those choices on individual and plan costs. Education alone dropped ER utilization substantially. When combined with an increased out-of-pocket cost the following year, utilization fell still further, to roughly 10 percent.

Such campaigns not only boost enrollment but can also reduce costs and increase employee satisfaction.

Insight from plan usage and cost factors can help you know where to efficiently prioritize your time and resources – showing which plans and plan designs work well and which ones are less effective. For example, using anonymized data, you can show a client who’s thinking about offering a high deductible health plan (HDHP) the effect of similar moves made by peers in similar industries with comparable employee demographics. In addition to aiding the human resources department, such insight can also benefit the finance department’s projections.

From one-size-fits all to choose-your-own-adventure

Seasoned brokers know benefits offerings don’t work when employers take a one-size-fits-all approach. Today’s tech-savvy employees expect a robust set of offerings that essentially let them choose their own adventure – or in this case, their own benefits journey. Employees and employers alike want insights to help them make good decisions along the way.

By putting data analytics to work to reposition valuable benefits offerings, you can build a stronger “recommended for you” toolkit, improving your offerings, your relationships with clients, and your overall business.

Scott Evans is chief product officer at benefitexpress.