Bringing consumer-directed benefits into the digital era
Making tax-advantaged benefit plans easier to navigate will allow employees to make better use of their benefits.
Consumer-directed benefits are supposed to make life easier for employees. By using pre-tax benefit plans like HSAs and FSAs to pay for everything from medical and dental care to commuter costs, workers can save money while gaining more control over their earned income.
Tax-advantaged programs like HSAs and FSAs can also offset a portion of rising health care costs shouldered by both employers and employees. Health benefit costs for employers are expected to rise by more than 5% in the new year, while deductibles for participants have increased by 70% over the past decade. Half of Americans are enrolled in high-deductible health care plans. Yet tax-advantaged benefit accounts remain widely underutilized.
Related: Unlocking the power of HSAs for employers and employees
In reality, using tax-advantaged benefits can be anything but convenient. Employees have to juggle multiple physical cards for each benefit plan, fill out paper forms and scan receipts to mail or fax, and endure endless reimbursement timelines. Web portals are dated and confusing, and getting an accurate idea of account balances can be frustrating. Calling into customer service is often a time-consuming exercise in futility. It’s a far cry from the kind of seamless and intuitive experiences consumers have come to expect in the digital era.
Life is no better for the benefits professionals administering the program. Following a decade of industry consolidations, most consumer-directed benefits platforms are a patchwork of disjointed technologies and nonintegrated processes requiring constant babysitting by human agents. As requests and reimbursements inevitably fall through the cracks, employees call in for help while agents scramble to figure out who dropped the ball. Customer support becomes a bloated and inefficient function that adds cost while still falling short of expectations.
Providers can’t staff their way out of this mess. Instead, they should use technology to rebuild the system from the ground up to focus on the experience of the user. By making tax-advantaged benefit plans easier for both employees and employers to access and navigate, they can escape runaway customer support costs while helping people make better use of their benefits.
Where consumer-directed benefits go wrong—and how they can be better
I gained a firsthand perspective on this issue as an executive at one of the country’s largest consumer-directed benefits providers, where I had been tasked with building the customer service experience of the future. This modernization effort made great strides in aggregating our teams and updating our core technologies, but we ran into complications with the applications participants and clients used to administer each of our programs. Growing through consolidations, we were managing multiple platforms, one for COBRA, another for HSA, and so on. At one point, we had over 30 applications requiring dedicated support and training, not to mention a very large IT infrastructure.
The complexity of this type of platform affects employees, who have to log in and out of one portal after another to access each of their savings plans, and also benefits managers, who find the systems equally difficult to navigate and often have to reach out for assistance as well. When a platform incurs such a heavy support burden, the solution isn’t to keep adding resources to support. It’s to design the platform so that less support is needed. If you get the technology and user experience right for both employees and employers, they can use and administer their benefits more easily without depending on a staff of hundreds to keep things moving.
For benefits managers, a better experience begins with easier access to information across plans. Employers need clear visibility into who is enrolled in which plan, how various plans are being utilized, how these metrics compare across plans, and so on. They should never have to call their vendor’s relationship manager to find out how to run a report—as happens all too often. They should also be able to build, implement, and administer the right mix of plans for their business through a single system, without having to hopscotch across disparate portals. Any member of the benefits team should be able to manage any of the benefit plans offered, without having to learn more than one application.
For employees, the best experience is one where you never have to call for help in the first place. Who wants to spend their valuable time searching for an 800 number and then pressing endless prompts in hopes of finding the right person who understands your needs? A call to a customer support rep is a sign of a defect—an indication that the technology hasn’t done its job effectively to enable the user.
High-effort customer experiences disintegrate the relationship between the customer and the company regardless of how great of a product/service the company provides. Processes should be built from the ground up in a way that people always understand what to do next. They should be given the information they need without having to ask for it: what is an FSA? How do I submit for reimbursement? What’s the status of my claim? When can I expect to receive payment? The system should be as seamless and intuitive to use as an Uber, Slack, or Starbucks app—instead of feeling like it was designed in 1997.
A better self-serve experience doesn’t just reduce the need for customer support by the provider; it also enables a faster response for employees. With time-consuming human processes replaced by automated technologies, users can get expenses reimbursed in real-time rather than waiting for weeks to see what happens.
For 80% of consumers, the experience a company provides is deemed just as important as the product or services it provides. The 100 million Americans signed up for tax-advantaged benefits deserve an easier way to access and use those plans—and their employers need a more efficient way to administer them. By building a better user experience into the technology, platform providers can bring tax-advantaged benefits into the digital era—and help every member of the ecosystem achieve the full value they expect.
Scott Rose is Elevate’s chief operating officer and has more than 30 years of leadership experience with a laser focus on client/customer experience. Most recently, Scott was the COO of the tax-advantaged benefits company WageWorks (acquired by HealthEquity). Prior to WageWorks, Scott spent a decade at McKesson as the VP of Customer Care where he provided strategic and operational leadership in all aspects of customer service.
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