Dialog Health collaborated with human resources industry experts to identify five of the top communication pain points experienced during open enrollment and deliver solutions to tackle these challenges. In this blog, we'll share those top pain points and then explain how texting helps overcome each one by providing a real-life example of text messaging in use.
Top 5 Benefits Enrollment Communication Challenges
The following is a summary of the top benefits enrollment communication pain points
1. Missed key dates and deadlines
Email reminders about enrollment can get deprioritized and lost in an employee's inbox, and voicemails often go unchecked. Many employees lose sight of the enrollment window and risk not electing their benefits in time. Continued email, mail, and phone call follow-up efforts can be time-consuming, frustrating, and expensive.
2. Lack of employee awareness of resources
Employees are not always aware of the resources available to them during enrollment, such as a website with information, a benefits partner, FAQs, or informational benefits meetings. Time and money are spent developing resources that may be underutilized.
3. Difficulty engaging a remote workforce
Not every employee is easily reachable. Some employees might be working from home, others may be on the road. There is no way of knowing if they opened an email, received the letter, or listened to a voicemail.
4. Lack of insight into employee's experience
Each employee has a different opinion on the benefits being offered and the resources available to them. They may also have questions that have yet to be answered. It's important to capture these insights to improve the enrollment process.
5. Difficulty communicating mass / group updates
Enrollment plans regularly change, necessitating a timely employee update. Sometimes the change is an extensive update that all staff must be made aware of. Other times, it's an update that applies to only a certain group of employees within the company. It's critical to get any time-sensitive updates out in a fast, efficient, and reliable manner.
Text Messaging: The Effective Way to Address Enrollment Communication Obstacles
Here are examples of ways human resources professionals use the Dialog Health two-way texting platform to improve their benefits enrollment communication.
1. Communicate Key Deadlines and Nudge Non-Compliant Employees
The Problem: If an employee misses the enrollment deadline, they may face the inability to change their coverage or even a possible loss of coverage. Furthermore, the human resources team is affected because they must deal with additional administrative burdens and frustrated employees.
The Solution: Automating a series of texts to go out before enrollment starts and throughout the enrollment period is a simple, effective way to increase engagement during the campaign. Dialog Health's reporting feature also allows you to see receipt of text communications, and the customizable platform allows you to send additional communication to non-compliant employees.
Sample Results: In a single month, a human resources department sent more than 20,000 texts to nearly 4,000 employees informing them of benefit options, enrollment dates, and links to select their benefit plans. This increased the open and read rate of their enrollment campaign and drastically reduced administrative time and costs.
2. Provide Links to Resources and Improve Resource Usage
The Problem: Human resources teams work hard to provide employees with resources to guide them during enrollment, such as websites, portals, videos, and informational meetings. Employees, however, may be unaware of the resources that are available to them and how to access them.
The Solution: Dialog Health's two-way texting platform allows you to text links to your employees, taking out the guesswork of where and how to access information. By texting links, your employees have easy access to these resources, greatly increasing engagement. Note: 99% of mobile phone can access the internet, making the texting of links a great way to deliver timely information.
Sample Results: In a company of nearly 4,000 employees, a link to the new human resources portal shared via text message was clicked more than 4,500 times during the open enrollment period. Considering only 6% of employees opted out of receiving texts, utilization of the texted link surpassed 100%.
3. Enhance Engagement With Remote/Dispersed Workforce
The Problem: Not all employees are easily accessible within the office. In the aftermath of COVID-19, many employers are continuing a remote or semi-remote office policy. As a result, employee engagement can be even more challenging than in the past The Solution: Texting is the most effective way to communicate timely, critical information with a large majority of employees while getting the engagement you want and the responses you need.
Sample Results: With an open rate of 97%, texting has 4x the open rate of emails. Furthermore, 95% of text messages are read within three minutes of being sent. Texting is proven to drive engagement and quickly and efficiently gather information needed. It has also been used to send motivational messages during difficult times.
4. Request Feedback with Surveys
The Problem: Since each employee interacts with the enrollment process differently, it is difficult to anticipate the needs of every employee.
The Solution: Dialog Health's Survey Program allows you to get feedback on your enrollment process and helps you find opportunities for improvements in your program's efficiency and effectiveness.
Sample Results: An organization achieved an 83% response rate to a survey text, providing them critical information to improve their communication and process. The survey also enhanced employee satisfaction.
5. Quickly Share Changes and Updates
The Problem: Since enrollment operates within a defined window of time, when unexpected change arises, it is vital that employees are informed of these changes as quickly as possible.
The Solution: Dialog Health's Mass Communication Program allows you to send updates to everyone in the company or targeted updates to a specific subset of your workforce. This drastically reduces staff workload and significantly improves the reach rate of critical, time-sensitive information.
Sample Results: When faced with a last-minute change to its open enrollment process, one employer needed just 10 minutes to send a text message update to more than 4,000 people simultaneously.
The Undeniable Value of Texting for Benefits Enrollment Communication
By leveraging the Dialog Health two-way texting platform to support their benefits enrollment communications, organizations are experiencing impressive results such as the following:
Significantly higher response and engagement rates
Increased usage of website/portal
Improved employee satisfaction
Reduced cost of communication and management
Streamlined reporting and confirmation of benefits
Dialog Health's two-way texting platform is easy to use and quick to deploy. It's a cloud-based platform, so there are minimal IT requirements for users. No data integration is required, and we deliver great customer service that helps streamline implementation and ensure our users are maximizing the benefits of text messaging.
To learn more about how Dialog Health can help your organization execute its open enrollment program this year, please contact us at info@dialoghealth.com, 877.666.1132, or schedule a demo of our platform.
