benefitexpress
Precise and High-touch Services for Benefit Administration

By offering a competitive benefits package, organizations can hire and retain top talent. In fact, several surveys reveal that work benefits— be it health, dental and vision insurance, life insurance, disability insurance, or a retirement plan—play a vital role in improving job satisfaction. However, executing the administration of these plans is no easy task. It requires HR professionals to stay current with changing regulations and rightly handle all the crucial information. Running a benefits program is also a time-consuming affair and an added burden for HR departments that already deal with the complexities of recruitment, workplace safety, employee relations, or labor law compliance. Additionally, employees are often found struggling to navigate the countless number of benefits and packages being offered. This adds to their frustration and adversely impacts productivity and satisfaction. To this end, it has become essential for employers to develop an impactful and cost-effective employee benefits strategy that drives benefits management while controlling cost.

benefitexpress makes a difference here by automating complex processes with its intuitive platform. The company serves as an extended team for clients’ benefits departments and paves the way for high-quality, customer-centric, and streamlined benefits administration.

Founded in 2001, benefitexpress has grown to work with over 80 employers and 300 brokers, and more than 3,500 employer groups through its broker clients. “We are confident in our people, approach to the marketplace, value and priority of our investments, and ability to execute on a controlled growth plan which never sacrifices our clients’ confidence in us,” says Bill Mayhew, Chief Technology Officer, benefitexpress.

In an interview with CIO Applications, Mayhew shares insights on how they eliminate the administrative burden to enable clients to focus on enhancing the health and wellness of their employees.

Could you give us a brief overview of benefitexpress?

We are a market-leading benefits administration solutions provider with first-class customer service, industry-leading technology, and deep domain knowledge. By offering a SaaS solution that integrates all benefits activity in one centralized platform, we provide simplicity to complex plans and offer a custom-made experience that engages and educates employees while offering employers high-touch benefits management that is unmatched in the market. We offer a suite of end-to-end solutions, including benefits enrollment, management and administration, direct bill services, reimbursement account administration, carrier bill reconciliation, dependent verification, and a full-service call center designed to act as an extension of our client’s benefits department.

We have the financial backing to fund our growth. We have a seasoned executive leadership team to execute our plan.

Most importantly, we have committed and engaged employees with deep benefits experience who serve our clients. Our team is always dedicated to quality, growth, and continually improving the breadth and depth of our industry knowledge, along with the technology to deliver and adapt to the constant flux of the healthcare industry and the ever-evolving needs of our clients.

What are the challenges that clients faced during the pandemic, and how did you help them mitigate those?

As a valued partner to our clients, we have helped clients navigate through the unprecedented challenges that the pandemic presented. No matter how difficult or time-sensitive the request, our system flexibility, and service-first mentality enabled us to resolve every issue effectively— many within 24 hours—and meet clients’ rapidly evolving needs. Even during the pandemic, our goal remained the same—to be benefits wise and relationship-driven. We pride ourselves on how we adapted to work from home requirements during these unpredictable circumstances and continued delivering industry-leading service to our clients uninterruptedly.

Much of this was possible due to the crucial support of our IT department. Their dedication, hard work, and late nights resulted in no interruptions to our workflow, including client interaction and service.

Could you elaborate on how your solutions evolved?

As a company, we have always focused on leveraging state-of-the-artt echnologies to design innovative processes and address the diverse needs of clients. For instance, we have recently migrated to Amazon Web Services (AWS) and are constantly educating and training our teams. Additionally, we have an innovation round table to encourage and give people time to evaluate new technologies and use these to bring forward new ideas. For example, we just recently launched a chatbot, and the team had spent significant time in the innovation round table, working with that technology and learning about it prior to the project.

To streamline the workflow and processes for client-facing and call center teams during the pandemic, we migrated to a cloud-based phone system. This enabled us to onboard ninety part-time call center reps remotely, just in time for our “busy season” of open enrollment. We are a fully agile shop. Our development team works closely with other departments, including product and operations teams. As such, we can quickly respond to any issue. We also give a lot of autonomy to our team members and allow them to share their ideas. benefitexpress believes in working as a community—if you have a good idea, it will be supported!

What are the key differentiating factors that set you ahead in the competition?

Our in-depth industry knowledge provides us a competitive advantage. From executive team to product team and development team, everyone has years of experience working in the benefits administration field. They understand how benefits work and all its complications. Secondly, our customer-centric approach and focus on long-term relationships allow us to acquire new clients while retaining the existing ones. More than 90 percent of our clients actively serve as a reference for us. Thirdly, our platform’s modern, modular, and scalable functionality is crucial. It allows our client services reps to make changes for our clients without any time-consuming updates. Lastly, our diverse team is a key differentiator for us. We have 63percent females in our company, including 60percent at the leadership level. We always encourage women in leadership and ensure we have the best people in the best roles. This inclusive culture helps us attract and retain the best talent in our company.

What does the future hold for benefitexpress?

We have recently announced an acquisition by WEX—a leading financial technology service provider—to drive our future growth. With this integration, we will add a complementary suite of solutions to WEX’s offerings in benefits administration, including employee enrollment and decision support tools for employees. This will also include essential value-added services, such as Affordable Care Act compliance, dependent verification services, and other benefit administration services. Moreover, we expect to broaden.