Are you still living in the dark ages?

Even though technology is all around you, wherever you go, some people still live in the dark ages when they are at work! Are you guilty?

We have seen the efficiencies technology can bring in our personal lives. You can order just about anything from your phone, view who is at your doorbell when you are not around, look up anything without heading to a library or dragging out the encyclopedia, and yet sometimes we head to work and still fax, fill out paper applications, and audit things manually.

Is it because we are afraid to change, or we think we could lose a client or two. Maybe we just like the comfort of what we know! None of these answers are wrong necessary but let’s stop and think how much any of these answers are worth. For example, do you have a team of people who audits insurance applications or manually enters them into your enrollment or claims system all year around. Do they have to work overtime during 4th Quarter Open Enrollment season? Have you found data to be entered incorrectly or inadvertent mistakes made? All these things can cost you money, inefficiencies, and unhappy customers.

Taking a small step towards change and moving out of the dark ages by implementing an online eligibility and enrollment platform will pay off in numerous ways.

1. You will have happy clients! Your clients order multiple things online daily, and they want that ease with everything they do. Giving them a unique shopping cart experience to make their benefit elections with embedded links to the documents, videos, network information they need makes their lives easier!

2. Efficiencies you may not have known you needed! A good enrollment system will have built in rules to prevent employees from electing benefits they cannot enroll in, selecting wrong family tiers, omitting dependent data, etc. Your team will no longer have to chase down people to get missing info, check calculations or spend hours auditing applications! More importantly you will no longer have the errors that can cost you a lot in penalties, legal fees, or claims costs.

3. Accuracy! An enrollment system you can trust will have accurate enrollment data and should be the source of truth! A good system will have a built-in reconciliation tool, so you can run outside data against your to find discrepancies.

4. Get rid of your file room! You no longer need special rooms for paper applications stacked to the ceilings, or in file cabinets. A good enrollment system will have electronic signatures, time and date stamps, history of all elections and most of all the ability for you to access that data for years to come.

5. Saves you money! Administrative time saved equals money saved. An open enrollment that took your staff 40 hours to handle in the past can now be done in 5 hours or less.

Sometimes it can be scary to make a change, especially with a new technology, but in the world of benefits the pros outweigh the cons when it comes to enhancing your eligibility and enrollment experience.