Don’t Leave Benefits Choice to Luck

We’ve all been there. We have a whole array of choice before us, different options just vying for our attention, but you get overwhelmed by all the different options that you just pick blindly, or worse, don’t pick at all? Maybe you struggle with coming up with the right criteria to choose on, maybe you’re limited on time, maybe you don’t know what you’re evaluating so it makes it hard to evaluate at all.
If there are too many options, maybe a chocie is never made at all.  Buyer paralysis is a real thing, and it’s happening in the insurance industry. Consumers over-analyze their choices to a point where

Making decisions can be hard, especially when it’s not something you’re looking forward to. Who gets excited about buying health insurance?

Most consumers don’t have a large amount of time to spend evaluating benefit options—or if they do have the time, they don’t want to spend it buying insurance. But the good news is that even if you don’t have time, you don’t have to leave your decision to luck.

Decision support tools are a great option for companies who want to help their employees narrow down their options and create a base line for selecting their options.

Heart vs Mind

According to Dan Ariely, options distract us because “we have an irrational compulsion to keep doors open” and we can’t focus on the most important things because we’re “running back and forth among the things that might be important.” We’re stuck between two mindsets—financial and emotional—and it’s difficult to decide which mindset to make our final decision with. While most of today’s decision support tools are great at assessing the financial side of insurance buying, they lack the emotional side that is crucial when it comes to benefits enrollment.

How can you engage the emotional side of benefits buying?

By making a decision based off of only one side of benefits choice—either financial or emotional—you’re leaving the decision up to luck.

HR needs to support their employees and their dependents to confidently navigate the less-than-friendly waters of benefits selection by providing them tools to accurately

A benefits recommendation engine that considers the emotional side of the question would ask an employee about their tolerance for emotional risk, perceptions of risk-taking behavior, consumer behavior, health status, and heath compared with national health data.