How an Employee Benefits Contact Center Helps Support Open Enrollment Success

From Zoom meetings and online videos to personalized recommendations and plan comparison tools, technology has certainly made it easier for employees to learn about their benefits. 

However, even effective self-service enrollment technology may not make every employee self-sufficient. There will likely continue to be a need for human interaction to help employees feel more confident when making important decisions or changes during benefits enrollment. Learn how offering an employee benefits contact center as open enrollment support could help contribute to OE success. 

The Role of Decision Support Tools 

Decision support tools are generally an important part of the self-service experience. These include tools like cost calculators, plan comparison breakdowns and personalized benefit combinations that model an employee's likely usage against each plan option. These tools can help reduce guesswork and enable employees to narrow their choices before they need to ask a question. But a tool is most useful when employees feel confident using it, which is where human support comes in. 

Why Employees Still Need Human Support 

Think about an automated phone system. Have you ever pressed "0" for an operator instead of choosing another option? While that operator is likely to guide you toward the same action the system would, sometimes you just feel more confident when a human is there to ask questions that can provide reassurance in your final choices. 

The same could be said for employees enrolling in their benefits. Even with strong direction and resources, some employees may need extra help through an online chat or quick phone conversation with a person before they feel ready to take action. 

This is the core of an effective support model: an AI-driven chatbot can handle many routine, repeatable questions with responses sourced from your plan-specific knowledgebase, while live agents can support moments that require judgment, reassurance or a more complex explanation. The goal is to help employees keep moving forward so they are less likely to abandon the process part way through. 

When You May Need Open Enrollment Reinforcement 

It's not necessarily a bad thing for employees to have questions. But do you have the time and resources to handle all of them during open enrollment? 

The answer for some benefit professionals may be no, which is why additional support can be helpful. That's where dedicated benefits enrollment support comes in. With a dedicated employee benefits contact center, you can help employees get answers to common and important questions while reducing some of the strain on your company's benefits team. 

Before choosing that support, consider whether the partner can help create a connected and consistent experience for your employees. 

5 Essential Features of an Employee Benefits Contact Center 

Whether you call it a benefits call center or an employee benefits contact center, the goal is the same: give employees a reliable place for support. Here are five important features of a dedicated employee benefits contact center that can help support open enrollment: 

Multilingual benefits support 

Interpretive language services can be especially important when you have a large population of workers who either don't speak English or speak English as a second language. Benefits can be complex, so communicating in an employee's preferred language can help support understanding. 

This is where multilingual support across both live assistance and the enrollment platform can make a meaningful difference. When employees can navigate the enrollment experience in their preferred language, they may be less reliant on a phone call alone to bridge the gap. Pair that with phone support available through interpretive services, and employees have access to multilingual support whether they're enrolling on their own or reaching out for guidance. 

Take a multi-channel service approach 

Different employees prefer different methods when it comes to seeking support. Picking up the phone isn’t always the most convenient thing either when they’re juggling work and family. 

Today’s employee benefit contact centers should offer multiple options for employees to get answers beyond a phone call, including a live chat feature and email support with clearly defined response expectations. 

Strong contact centers treat these channels as one connected system rather than separate options. AI-powered chat and self-service tools should be able to recognize when a question is too nuanced for automation and route the employee to a live person who is equipped to answer their question without making them start over. 

Understand your benefits program in and out 

You're turning over a high volume of questions to a dedicated support team. To handle questions efficiently, they should be trained in your benefit plans, as well as the technology your employees are using. AI can be used as an added layer to that training, with tools like predictive routing that helps identify an available agent to assist with a caller’s needs and automatic call summaries that may reduce the time agents need to make call notes and record next steps. The goal is to avoid situations where an employee calls in and waits while the support team searches through benefit materials or navigates the technology. 

It's also important that the support team understands your company culture and benefits brand, so they can reflect that when communicating with your employees. A strong outcome is for the support experience to feel aligned with your company's HR approach. 

Offer flexible service options 

You want to help your employees access support when they need it. For some workforces, that means enrolling in benefits outside traditional business hours. Look for a contact center that offers extended live-agent coverage and pairs it with an AI-powered chatbot that can answer common questions around the clock, helping reduce waiting when employees need assistance. 

Flexibility also means meeting employees where they are in their benefits journey. A strong contact center can support phone enrollments for employees who prefer a guided conversation, while also helping address year-round needs like qualifying life events, new-hire enrollment, and eligibility appeals. 

Then there’s the question of scope. Maybe your team just needs an extra boost during open enrollment. Or maybe you want broader support that can include administrative tasks like dependent verification, QMSCO administration, death claims coordination and enrollment and eligibility appeals. The ability to scale your level of support up or down as your needs change is important and can be supported by workforce management practices like capacity planning, contact forecasting and real-time staffing adjustments that help reduce the risk of being over- or under-resourced. 

These administrative tasks can create significant time demands for internal benefits teams during and after open enrollment. Offloading some of this work to a contact center can help offer HR staff more bandwidth to focus on strategy and plan design instead of paperwork. 

Deliver service excellence via workforce management 

Workforce management can play an important role in delivering high-quality service. It helps support adequate staffing, effective scheduling and continuous improvement. 

Behind a strong front-line contact center is often a dedicated workforce management team focused on staffing, scheduling, and quality monitoring. This backbone can help a contact center continue improving the support your employees receive. 

If you're looking for additional open enrollment support, a meaningful employee benefits contact center can bring together many of these capabilities and help reduce the risk of employees or HR teams feeling unsupported during a busy season. 

The result can be a more supported experience for employees and less day-to-day administrative pressure on your HR team during one of the busiest times of year. 

Planning for your next open enrollment? 

Download our Open Enrollment Planning Toolkit for a playbook, infographic, and checklist that help you plan every step of the season. Pair it with the human support of our Employee Benefits Contact Center to help employees navigate benefits decisions and give your HR team their time back during a busy season.