How do you redesign an established employee benefits system so that it truly benefits everyone?
Enabling this major workplace health and benefits provider to modernize its platform for users while reducing costs for its clients and meet changing market expectations.
The challenge
‘The Great Resignation’ that followed the global pandemic reaffirmed the importance of looking after your employees. Employers quickly realized that traditional approaches to workplace benefits were undermining their efforts to attract and retain talent. This leading health and benefits provider needed to quickly modernize its outdated platform to deliver better experiences to employees and greater digital efficiencies to its employer clients.
Employee benefits are a critical element of any employer value proposition. That’s what had made the original platform so successful in the first place. Yet digital developments over the previous decade – as well as the shock of recent events – meant the company needed to modernize and create a single platform that would serve organizations of all sizes while offering a much smoother user experience. With fierce competition from digital natives, they needed to act fast.
That’s when they turned to Emergn to help develop a platform that was not only more user-focused but also flexible and cost-effective for employers.
Approach
The company’s approach to the modernization program was unique in itself. Emergn was one of 10 global teams working on different aspects of the platform redesign. Yet it was our approach to product design – incorporating Design Thinking, Agile, Lean and cutting-edge technical expertise – and product management that ensured we delivered exactly what the company needed.
Our role was to provide support at various critical stages of the product creation process. Emergn business analysts worked closely with the company’s product owners to help shape the requirements and then prioritize specific activities. Our developers and Quality Assurance engineers implemented and tested proposed product designs in line with the company’s rigorous standards. We even covered some of the management roles to ensure that what we were working on was aligned with other aspects of the wider modernization program.
Collectively, we helped create a new, cost-efficient platform that is already revolutionizing the US health and benefits market. It’s simplifying, enriching and empowering individual employees to access, monitor and adjust their health and benefits whenever they like, not just once a year like before. Meanwhile, its employer clients can demonstrate they have a state-of-the-art health and benefits system that includes the kind of self-help tools, enrolment support, educational materials and calculators that employees now expect.
Our impact
The company’s modernization program was driven by a need to stay competitive by giving its clients and end users added value. The changes that Emergn helped make happen created a health and benefits platform that is now more cost-effective and user-friendly than ever.
Our product design expertise enabled the company to retire two legacy systems and successfully migrate a large installed user base over to the new platform with minimal disruption.
Clients now enjoy access to the new platform plus an integrated bundle of consulting, communication and administration services. As a result, they have recorded increased employee engagement with an average 97% customer satisfaction rating and 75 Net Promoter Score. They have also seen savings of between 5-10% in their total medical spend and 1.7% on coverage selected by employees thanks to people self-selecting optimum health and benefits packages.
Employees using the platform also spent an average $372 less on their coverage, which reduced coverage fees for their employers. Due to the savings, they also typically selected one additional coverage option compared with those who didn’t use it, meaning they enjoyed additional benefits from their salary contributions. All of which shows that with the right product design approach, major digital transformation can have immediate, tangible outcomes for organizations and individuals alike.
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