Educating before enrolling
A key part of the open enrollment education and communication process is often overlooked until just before open enrollment, when it’s often too late.
As open enrollment season approaches, we and our employer customers pay a great deal of attention to constructing benefit communication plans that will help educate their workforce on the benefits offered in their annual enrollment period. This especially applies to communication around voluntary options.
However, another key part of this education and communication process is often overlooked until just before open enrollment, when it’s often too late. I’m referring to training the enrollers who will be meeting with employees and actually delivering the benefit messages.
Related: 10 tips to ease the open-enrollment process
This fall, there will be thousands of people conducting voluntary benefit enrollment sessions. They are supposed to be educating employees, answering questions and guiding employees in making good choices.
All that reinforces the importance of enroller training. But how do we ensure our enrollers are appropriately trained?
In planning this training, we have to overcome multiple obstacles. For one, product training for a specific case has to be done after the plan design is fully locked in, and that is usually “just in time” before an enrollment. The velocity of business we have to support each fall is such that it’s easy to overlook enrollment training. That’s why now is the best time to lay the groundwork. Plan to conduct at least part of enrollment training in advance. Advance training on fundamentals like values, professional presentations and compliance can keep case-specific product training focused on the job at hand.
Consider the many elements of enroller training. One obvious item is knowledge of the products and services. But product training needs to be set in the context of training enrollers to uncover the needs of eligible employees and their dependents. An enrollment discussion always circles around identifying needs and then describing how our benefit solutions meet them. Needs are the anchors of employee engagement, and participation follows engagement.
We also have to train the enrollers on the enrollment process. We need to define what medium of enrollment will be used: paper forms, web enrollment, mobile device enrollment, etc. Enrollers need to help employees access their enrollment media and guide them through the process. A successful enrollment introduces the product relevance that responds to needs—supported by an easy process—and one of an enroller’s key jobs is teaching employees how easy that process is.
There’s also a compliance aspect to enrollment training. This includes covering the mandatory forms and product disclaimers—especially limitations and exclusions, which should always be mentioned during the course of enrollment. Ethical standards of presentation should be covered. Obviously, enrollers must be trained not to exaggerate or intentionally misstate the benefits provided by our products.
Finally, let’s not overlook training enrollers on the professional standards we expect them to uphold. We need to underscore the values our organization follows whenever we deal with customers. Never overlook the fact that enrollers are representing your organization’s values as well as the products and services being presented.
Trained enrollers are at the core of great enrollment results. Start planning your training program today!