What Is Your ROI on Voluntary Benefits
We have indicated to our clients and colleagues for some time now that many employers do not receive adequate return for the investment they make in providing the financial/administrative platform for brokers and carriers to make direct sales to their employees. We have written more extensively on this subject in several of our The Insight e-newsletters. Issue 08.5.2 can be viewed directly by clicking here. We can also provide a copy via an email request to editor@bocabenefits.com. Our entire e-newsletter archive is available by clicking here: e-newsletter archive. A summary of our thoughts is below:
- Make sure you receive some level of service from the commissions earned by the broker on the voluntary benefits that are sold to your employees. You should know what the commission loads on the products are and if you are properly sharing. It is not uncommon for top brokers to forego over half the commissions payable via splits with service companies that bring added value to the client.
- Most often these are one-on-one enrollment services provided by a third party vendor and associated communication pieces.
- Communications are uniquely designed specifically to deliver the messages you want going to your employees.
- Voluntary enrollments can be packaged with your core benefit enrollments and the data can be electronically uploaded to your core benefit carriers.
- If you are presently using a voluntary benefits carrier that does not provide these kind of services, BBCG can assist you with a change.
We have been strong supporters of using broker commissions on voluntary benefits to finance on-site, laptop-captured, enrollments and communications packages provided by specialty companies. There are several well established voluntary products carrier/enrollment company relationships for that purpose. Face-to-face interaction has proven to be very important, especially in the area of consumer driven health options such as HSA’s. A knowledgable broker or enroller-agent can go a long way in raising comfort levels for employees faced with daunting enrollment options. Often the products themselves are imposing in complexity. Secondly, often employees do not want to ask questions in open meetings for fear of exposing themselves to critiscm. There may also be a latent fear among some employees that the motivation of the employer relative to a certain offering might be less than altruistic and that they are being sold something about which they don’t understand. The enroller can assuage those fears with extended personal discussion.
All the above being said, we are turning away from the on-site, laptop-captured, enrollment and communications approach as being the best option. We believe that a hybrid model might provide better results. A 24/7/365 benefits-specific web portal that can be used by employees and their co-decision makers (i.e., spouses, children, and others) as an education tool, both as a run-up to the open enrollment season and as a follow-up in the ensuing months, is just as critical as the one-on-one face-to-face interaction of an enroller. We do not feel that one replaces the other. Rather than ask the enrollment company to design and implement the communications program, possibly the best option is to just have them do the enrollment piece per se and leave the communications as part of the benefits-specific web portal process. If negotiated properly by your broker, the total cost of both programs together should not exceed the former approach. In fact, we feel pretty certain that there may be room for additional services as well. BBCG can provide a sophisticated benefits-specific web portal at no cost to clients in most cases. Please click here to open a web based Power Point slide show pertaining to our web portal approach. If your browser is not compatible with the slide show file, please email us at webportal@bocabenefits.com and we will send you a Power Point file.
A free benefits package benchmarking report can also be provided to allow you to tailor the communications strategy you provide on the web portal. Your strategy can be dynamic during the course of the year and it can periodically change to reflect the various objectives you established during the benchmarking process.
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