Throughout the year, Milliman conducts regular Pulse Surveys focused on benefits topics that employers find meaningful and strategically informative. For this survey, we looked at what trends are driving successful enrollment outcomes and improved benefits administration technology.
Key takeaways
Given the improvements in benefits administration technology, including support tools driven by artificial intelligence (AI), our survey reinforced that there still is a large amount of time and organizational resources dedicated to the administration of benefits, particularly for employers of fewer than 500 employees. Further, there is value to a high-touch response to employees’ concerns with benefits enrollment. Personal emails and live conversations (either in person, over the phone, or via live chat) are very popular methods of support.
In the drive to increase employee engagement, employers continue to explore methods that create a better understanding of their benefit programs. For example, 46% of respondents conducted an active enrollment this past year, which requires employees to review their offerings and make selections. At the same time, there does seem to be room for improvement in utilizing intelligence from enrollment into annual strategic benefits planning.
Open enrollment
Human resources (HR) professionals address a whole spectrum of questions during open enrollment, and responses to our Pulse Survey seem to support this. When asked what questions the HR team faces the most, answers were spread evenly among benefits clarifications, enrollment process clarifications, and questions regarding dependent eligibility as well as technology support.
Forty-six percent of respondents handle their annual enrollment processes completely in-house, with an additional 32% of respondents dedicating organization resources through a co-sourcing arrangement (with some aspects of administration sourced to a third party).
Communication is critical to a successful enrollment season, and the most successful methods for open enrollment education seemed to be evenly distributed among enrollment education sessions (73%), broadcast emails (80%), messaging on the enrollment platform (59%), and home mailers (61%). Overall, text messaging employees was the least popular method of communication (10%).
Benefits administration technology
Most respondents indicated that there was some form of decision support tool for health plans available (81%), with slightly less prevalence for non-health benefits (58%) and voluntary products (48%). Should members need additional support, the most popular methods from the survey were email or web forms (67%), U.S.-based call center support (36%), and live chat (31%). It is worth noting that, in spite of the technology available, responses indicated that a fair amount of member support is also provided “in-person” by HR teams.
More than one-third of survey respondents (36%) said they review benefits administration providers and platform capabilities that are available in the market on an annual basis. When asked what capabilities respondents would most like to see, there was a broad spectrum of responses, with navigation support leading the way.
Download the full survey
Full details of the entire survey that includes respondent demographics and comprehensive illustrations of each response, visit our library of past Pulse Surveys on What’s Trending in Benefits? at https://www.milliman.com/en/periodicals/pulse-survey.
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Caveats
This survey summary has been prepared for information only. Milliman does not intend to benefit or create a legal duty to any recipient of this summary.