Strategies to Transform Benefits Administration

Companies struggle with benefits administration, scoring only 55/100 in satisfaction, leading to potential employee turnover; however, experts from PlanSource emphasize the importance of user-friendly processes, effective integration, and leveraging AI to streamline management and improve employee engagement.

The most important asset that any company has is its people. Leading SAP organizations invest significant time and resources in ensuring that employees are satisfied and able to add value to their companies.

Yet one of the most important areas where companies struggle is benefits administration. SAPinsider research found that professionals from across different fields give their benefits administration strategy and overall satisfaction score of just 55/100. With such low satisfaction around an important focus area for HR teams, companies risk employee turnover, low morale, and hiring difficulties.

To help overcome some of the common issues in this area, SAPinsider recently hosted a webinar with the benefits administration experts at PlanSource. PlanSource’s Chief People Officer Sharon Brand and Product and Technology Lead Srini Venkatramani sat down with SAPinsider’s Vishal Verma to understand the challenges in benefits administration and provide common-sense solutions that can bolster HR success.

Understanding the Market

The typical employee wants to quickly review and understand their benefits, then select which options best fit themselves and their families in a simple and seamless way. Yet many organizations reported that integration between applications and partners, user interface and user experience, and overall process efficiency all had notable room for improvement.

If benefits applications are not properly integrated or don’t have a helpful UI or UX, users struggle to understand what benefits they have access to and then make those important choices. This can cause negative impacts to both employees and their employers.

“We know that every year there’s a significant increase in cost around health care and benefits spend. It’s also critical to reinforce the employee experience and keep employees engaged. It’s not uncommon that employees today have a poor understanding of their benefits. That can lead to increased costs for both the employer and employee if they’re making selections that don’t meet their needs,” said Brand.

Companies must find tools that allow employees to fully engage with the benefits selection process – ensuring that benefits options are clearly communicated and easily accessible for all users. Yet this is easier said than done. While there are options to enhance benefits administration workflows, many organizations cannot prioritize these solutions or simply choose not to.

SAPinsider’s research found that competing priorities and lacking skillsets were the top two impediments to organizations achieving benefits administration success. Some organizations are focusing on other tasks like SAP S/4HANA implementations, finance and accounting process improvements, supply chain transformations, and others over benefits administration.

Other organizations lack the expertise needed to find impactful solutions or make improvements in this area. This creates a significant gap between the desire to improve and the ability to execute these important transformations.

Transforming Benefits Administration

To ensure that organizations are providing the right benefits to their employees – regardless of any skill gaps – many are turning to the benefits administration experts at PlanSource. It has years of experience providing helpful and accessible benefits to companies and their employees.

“People want capabilities that reduce the burden on HR teams in terms of managing and answering the questions around benefits. They also want to make sure that data discrepancies are reduced. They want seamless data integration between all the systems in the ecosystem, whether it is HCM systems, carrier systems, or benefit systems,” said Venkatramani.

PlanSource offers a wide variety of capabilities in this area, including tools that help guide users through benefits selection process. This offers users a seamless and self-guided process for selections and renewals that helps employees feel engaged as they choose the best option for themselves and their families.

How AI bolsters HR

In the webinar, PlanSource noted that it is on the cutting edge of leveraging Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology to enhance the benefits administration experience.

“We have taken a general purpose Chatbot and made it customized using generative AI. We trained our language models to look at specific benefit documents and plan documents for a particular employer and answer specific questions for the employee. For example, as an employee, I could go to my Chatbot and ask a question about hey? What would be my deductible under the health plan that I have chosen? What is my co-insurance? Will this be covered? This reduces at least 70% of the questions that typically go to the HR leaders, people can do it in a self-service manner,” said Venkatramani.

AI can provide users with side-by-side comparisons of different benefits options to help them make the best decisions. AI has also proven useful for the employer side as well. PlanSource’s AI can assist with dependent audit and dependent verification tasks, replacing manual processes where HR professionals had to sift through documents for hours. AI reviews these forms and flags any potential issues to a human for a second round of verification.

PlanSource also offers automation capabilities to support essential tasks like benefits reporting, enrollment, billing reconciliation and more. Automating these manual tasks not only reduces the risk of errors, but also frees up HR professionals to work on other important tasks.

Integrating with the ERP

As organizations search for the best benefits administration options for themselves and their employees, they must consider the importance of integrating data. Whether it is SAP or another ERP, employee information is often stored in siloes throughout the landscape. Employees need access to personal information, income data, and enrollment data to make selecting benefits a smooth process. PlanSource designed is benefits administration solutions to integrate seamlessly with SAP and other ERPs to streamline this process.

“Integrations is something that PlanSource has invested heavily in the last 5 years. When I think about the ecosystem, it is the HCM systems that typically host demographic information and payroll information. If there is a separate payroll company, we are the system of record when it comes to people’s eligibility and enrollment in terms of them selecting the benefits, and then the carrier systems, whether it’s medical, dental or voluntary benefits. We sit in the middle and we have built very tight real-time integrations among these systems in a hub and spoke model, so that there is a clear view around systems of record and systems of engagement,” said Venkatramani.

What This Means for SAPinsiders

Benefits administration should be user-friendly – Companies often struggle to maximize the value of their benefits program simply because employees do not understand it. HR teams should find user-friendly interfaces and simple explanations of benefits to ensure that employees are covered.

Visibility is crucial – A key aspect of benefits administration is ensuring that companies and their employees can access all of their important information. This ensures that users understand what benefits packages best meet their needs and allows them to quickly log in and select those options. Many organizations are turning to partners like PlanSource to ensure that they have tight integrations throughout their landscape and benefits administration is straightforward.

Reduce headaches with AI and automation – Like many other key workflows, benefits administration can benefit from AI and automation. HR professionals can automatically accomplish important tasks, leaving more time to add value to the workforce. AI can also help answer questions and compare benefits to keep employees better informed. Companies looking to improve benefits administration and other important HR workflows should consider partners like PlanSource that are leveraging these advanced capabilities, ensuring employee engagement and enhanced efficiency.