What Being Carrier Agnostic Really Means – Products Designed with Empathy

How can we use empathetic benefits practices to help employees?

If you are a follower of our blogs, you may have noticed a trending theme we like to mention, empathy.

Years ago, we made a thoughtful resolution to build our business philosophy around empathy and its importance to the benefits industry. The same holds true for our product.

According to our 2018 State of Workplace Empathy study, virtually all (97 percent) of CEOs, HR pros, and employees think benefits are a good way for an organization to demonstrate empathy to its workforce.

Why design benefits technology with empathy in mind?

Ensuring Benefitsolver is built and designed with empathy is something we continually focus and strive for, in order to meet the needs of our clients and their employee populations. In fact, it’s one of the pillars behind our decision to not only be carrier-agnostic, but to seek relationships with partners who share the same goal of empathetic design and experience.

How can we make the path to election easier?

Imagine this scenario: It’s Annual Enrollment, and you decided to take advantage of your employer’s supplementary life insurance, as a much-needed protection for your income. You elect the benefit and think you’re done, only to find out you have to track down and fill out a multi-page form to be uploaded in multiple places, complete an online screening and hunt down your medical history. Are you rethinking that benefit election?

When all parties are focused on empathetic design and experience, many of those steps are removed or at the very least re-thought. With HR technology being what it is today, it has to be about more than just the products being offered. Platforms and carriers must provide solutions that are seamless for the employee to enroll in. And it’s more important than ever, that employers are considering the enrollment process when choosing products and platforms to invest in.

What does it mean to be carrier agnostic?

Here at Businessolver, we are continually working with our carrier partners to create better integrations and seamless enrollments that put the end user first.

Our Transamerica integration is a great example of this. We found a need to create an elevated integration with a 401(k) partner that allowed employees to seamlessly contribute to their 401(k) while in a standard enrollment window. We wanted to remove the need to go back and forth between multiple systems. Instead, you can do it all from Benefitsolver through our API.

But it’s not just about the enrollment. If your employees don’t understand the benefits being offered them, then we are also not doing our jobs of creating empathetic benefits. Benefits technology platforms and carriers need to work together to create products that are easy for employees to understand and provide tools to educate throughout the process. With so many new benefit options coming to the surface, look for products that consider empathy within the plan design, ensuring your workforce not only enrolls in benefits, but enrolls in the RIGHT benefits at the RIGHT time.

Being carrier agnostic is important to us. Over the years, it has allowed us to maintain our business philosophy of empathy by working with our clients and their carriers, to provide benefit options that are not only easy to enroll in, but easy to understand.