Why benefits advisors can't forget about their own employees' expectations

When you hear about providing a digital experience through technology, it is generally in the context of your employer clients. But today’s competitive landscape and client expectations have pushed many agents and brokers to adopt client-facing technology, such as client portals and mobile apps. While delivering on clients’ expectations for digital experiences is important to a company’s growth, businesses forget to consider another critical component: their employees’ expectations for digital capabilities.

For too long, benefits advisors have relied on traditional, manual processes to model and compare benefit plan options, taking time away from the true value they provide by being a trusted advisor to their clients. For example, our company primarily used spreadsheets for years to create plan comparisons. Having been in business for several generations, we have seen the insurance industry transform and we have changed along with it, adopting tools to reduce the time and complexity caused by manual spreadsheets.

Before we dive into the digital transformation of benefits plan design and quoting, let’s first discuss the challenges our team ran into with the traditional process.

Wasting value with manual spreadsheets

Prior to using advanced technology, we used spreadsheets to track and compare benefits plans, which was time-consuming work that left substantial room for human error. As our Senior Employee Benefits Client Manager, Melissa Schultz, who previously managed the manual process says, “The majority of my job at that time was entering data and manipulating spreadsheets. If a cell was entered incorrectly or a formula was off, the entire spreadsheet could be wrong. It would then take even more time to find and correct the mistake.” Ensuring the plans are correct is an essential part of Melissa’s job; however, it shouldn’t be the core of her responsibility. The client experience should always be the focus.

Kyle VonRuden, one of our Employee Benefits Consultants, agrees that Hausmann Group needed to place greater attention on clients. “We used to have to guess what a client may want in their plan so we could have the comparisons ready for the meeting. After that, it would still take about three separate meetings with the client to get the plan right. It was just too much back-and-forth on our side and with the client because we couldn’t manipulate static spreadsheets during our conversations.”

So, just as we have continued to modernize our processes since 1946, we decided to transform our benefits department with digital technology.

Trading up for real-time benefits plan modeling

After switching to a management system that allowed for easy integration, we took on benefit plan software that models and compares benefit plan options for our clients in real time, completely changing Melissa’s workflow for the better. “The benefits designer flows client information directly from our management system, which saves me a ton of time entering data into the forms. Updating a renewal takes me about five minutes now, where it used to take me hours to update and validate the information.”

Trading up for real-time benefits plan modeling

After switching to a management system that allowed for easy integration, we took on something called Applied Benefits Designer that models and compares benefit plan options for our clients in real time, completely changing Melissa’s workflow for the better. “The benefits designer flows client information directly from our management system, which saves me a ton of time entering data into the forms. Updating a renewal takes me about five minutes now, where it used to take me hours to update and validate the information.”

Our company is also now much less at risk for errors and omissions. “There’s way less opportunity for error since it’s automatically pulled from the system,” Melissa says. “The formulas are also hard-coded into the system so we don’t have the issue of copying and pasting incorrectly. My job has become a lot less tedious and I feel like I can be more valuable to our clients.”

As a leader in the benefits department, it was important for me to see how digital technology made a difference in the way our associates viewed their position in the company. Melissa and other employees now have time to be experts in benefits trends and build deeper relationships with our clients.

Kyle also saw a difference in the way he was able to interact with our clients. Because he was able to manipulate plans on a screen in real time, he could have fewer – and more meaningful – conversations. “Being able to update plans right in front of our clients during our meetings made a huge difference for everyone involved. We can play around with different ideas and give clients insight into how small changes can affect the entire plan. We’ve even seen business owners bring their CFOs into our conversations so they can save time and make the most informed decisions, which make the deals even easier for us to close.”

For any business, client experience should be one of the highest priorities as it’s a primary revenue generator. However, I’ve seen how adopting technology that also relieves team members of manual processes can be just as lucrative, because they will have additional time for more meaningful interactions with clients. So, my advice? Listen to your team and they will take great care of your clients.

Kate Current is the Director of Employee Benefits Operations at Hausmann Group, where she works closely with Applied Systems.