With 4th quarter and enrollment season coming up fast, companies all over the nation will be in in overdrive enrolling their employee in their company-wide benefits. Enrollment companies are known to ease that time period by taking the burden of enrollments and administration off the company’s hands and onto their own team. With all of the enrollment and administration options in the market, many people are often left asking how one enrollment firm differentiates from the next and what truly separates the leading trusted advisors from the average enrollers.
The past year our organization has learned from benchmarking and working to help form National Enrollment Partners (NEP), a group of high-level enrollment firms in the country to collaboratively look for consistent quality, national coverage, and innovative ways to save on enrollment costs. With this expert level relationship this partnership includes:
• More than 9,500 active clients managed both locally and nationally
• 148 Account Executives responsible for new client acquisition and maintaining strong, broker partnerships.
• 37 Implementation Coordinators responsible for the implementation of all new and current clients. This includes the scheduling
of professional benefits counselors at all client locations.
• 28 Technology Administrators and Case Builders responsible for building and managing the Benefits Administration Systems
NEP’s firms are currently licensed to support.
• 278 Full-Time Benefits Counselors and 164 Part-Time Benefits Counselors used primarily during the 4th quarter.
• 15 Full-Time and 25 Part-Time Call Center Benefits Counselors.
Some best practices the leading organizations participate in that separate them from the rest of the pack are highlighted below.
Value of Scalable and Flexible Local Enrollment Solutions
Nothing beats a one-on-one enrollment session either in person or on the phone to show employees the value of their benefits package, teach them how to use a benefits administration system, and help them choose the right products for their individual needs. Leading benefits enrollment partnerships need to have the ability to offer in-person enrollment at every local level. This personal service ensures the highest level of employee information accuracy, and gives the employees ease of mind by having people in person that can serve as trusted advisors in helping them choose the best benefits plan for their specific needs and budget.
These organizations need to be able to scale, evolve, and adapt with any client’s specific requirements, while delivering a scalable quality controlled solution for benefit administration and enrollment that maintains complete compliance, no matter the region. Without this capability, organizations can often face obstacles in their enrollments and administration if they expand to a larger employee size or into a national field. Having this flexibility is key to helping those organizations grow with ease.
With small to mid-size companies, these organizations must understand and maintain notice that as they reach they mid to long term goals, their organizational benefits structures, enrollments, and level of administration will change. Enrollment firms with experience in creating these flexible solutions understand the impact it has when companies are ready to upgrade benefits admin systems to ones that take on larger employee bases. With growing complexity in benefits offerings they understand the benefits it brings when their enrollment partners provide consistent assistance and recommendations on how to cope with the growing amount of change in their benefits structures.
Strong Backbone for Building and Managing Benefits Administration Systems
True expert-level benefit administration organizations understand the need to be able to adapt and build on a variety of systems. Many benefit enrollment firms rely on an in house system that is tied to their proprietary software and are unwilling to unbundle this to give their clients and broker partners the keys to a lasting solution. We have found that leveraging collective expertise with building and management of benefits administration systems puts the customer first.
National Coverage
A multi-state employer must expect consistent quality in every office. Due to the nature of the seasonality of the industry with a heavy emphasis on fourth quarter many enrollment firsm rely on contract employees that only work with them a few times per year. A multi-state business should receive the same level of resources including enrollment call centers for every time zone. Having the ability to provide enrollment solutions from New York to California are what makes the leaders stand out from the rest. Leveraging local resources and bundling services is proving to be a better customer-focused solution.
Strong Focus on Quality and Ethics
Every benefits enrollment firm’s goal should be to create and maintain a mutually-beneficial working relationship with clients all the way to the employee level. Before signing any agreements, it is always a best practice to put together a five-year plan on funding and maintaining the enrollment and benefits administration system. This is key to helping drive consistent quality and expectations from the benefits enrollment firm from the beginning to the end.
Transparency and ethics with the enrollment go a long way in helping them make the best benefits decision that drives the engagement from your employees. Understanding how each interaction is measured with high quality standards is important in selecting a partner for your enrollment.
To sum it up, there are multiple areas that provide an opportunity to see what makes the difference for how true leaders stand out in a crowd. Reviews and testimonials in the end will speak for themselves both for the enrollment itself and on public sites such as glassdoor rating the experience in working for these companies. Operating and excelling on the backbones of scalability, adaptability, knowledge, and ethics are key to finding the enrollment solution that is much more than the average. With NEP, in selecting partners we are able to use data driven collaboration to help provide the lowest costs highest quality enrollment recommendations to clients on a local and national level. Make sure and look at these areas of differentiation when selecting your next partner.