Avoiding catastrophe: How to get benefits technology implementation right

For organisations that need to manage benefits for more than 500 people – often across several countries – an employee benefits platform is a no-brainer.

The right benefits technology set-up boosts employee net promotion score (eNPS), streamlines benefits admin and de-risks your people strategy.

An ill-thought out platform that doesn’t include the necessary scope, resource, and technology capabilities, is frustrating and costly in terms of budgets, compliance, risk, delays, system inefficiencies and disengaged employees.

Intelligent activation is essential

There’s a lot to consider when selecting a global benefits platform provider. But there’s more to selecting the right provider than just a great UX.

Organisations often overlook one or all of global functionality: support, expertise, implementation, testing and future-proofing.

Your technology needs to be augmented by people and the right partnerthat will make your programme a success.

Support for HR teams

Your provider should come with dedicated support and expert guidance to help you get maximum value from your platform and global benefits strategy as a whole.

You should have access to:

• A dedicated account manager to oversee implementation and ongoing strategy.
• A support portal that lets you track the progress of your requests, backed by clear SLAs guaranteeing fast response times.
• A team of global benefits experts to help you benchmark your offering, understand the local benefits landscape in each country, and ensure a smooth rollout.
• Data experts to make sure benefits information is securely exported, distributed and activated – 93% of global benefits providers can’t accept automated data so there’s still an element of data validation needed, even with APIs in place.

Global expertise

For each country rollout you need a global plan to consider local regulations, state provision, mandatory benefits, provider relationships, local communication needs, cultural contexts and administration requirements.

Your platform provider should have a team of global benefits experts helping you to benchmark your scheme, anticipating any hurdles you might encounter during your rollout.

Your provider can also help you navigate local challenges when rolling out global benefits.

“One of the biggest challenges for us was managing benefit providers in regions such as APAC because they aren’t as familiar with flexible benefit platforms,” said Jo Mercer, global benefits senior manager at Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer.

“The design and build of a platform is critical to the user experience when selecting and amending benefits, and this filters through to the overall success of the administration.

“Obtaining very specific design criteria to ensure our system truly reflected policy design was often challenging.”

Structured rollout

Without clear milestones and a phased approach, you’ll be stuck pushing back deadlines while HR scrambles to fix unexpected issues.

You will need a provider with a proven implementation framework, structured testing, and real-world case studies that prove they can handle complexity and rollout their tech across tens of countries.

How has the technology solved the customer’s challenges? How engaged are their employees? What did their roll-out journey look like?

Employee support

If employees don’t have 24/7 access to assistance for benefit queries, claims and troubleshooting, they’ll quickly become disengaged.

So how you get personalised support to all your people, wherever they are, and at whatever time they need it, is a core consideration for the success of your benefits programme.

At a time when much of the market is reducing employee support, a best-in-class provider will include employee support as standard – reducing the burden on HR teams.

The nature of employee benefits means there are times when employees will be seeking help with a benefits request that stems from a stressful or emotional situation.

While AI might be able to give the answer to many queries, employee experience advisors can support employees with empathy and emotional intelligence.

Employee support services can be a game-changer.

““For us, manual processes were the enemy […] We’ve found that implementing Benifex has really helped lift our teams up and they now have the bandwidth for bigger-picture thinking. For tickets we wanted to have a robust process in place. There are lots of easy-to-repeat questions that the team were spending a lot of time on. Outsourcing this support was a no brainer for us,” said Jennifer Burnett, director of US Benefits at Snowflake.

A stagnant product roadmap

The bottom line is that if your partner isn’t evolving, neither is your benefits strategy.

To help you identify whether the platform can truly support your organisation’s growth, look for a strategic roadmap that incorporates customer feedback and leverages AI to:

• Improve the user journey. For example, AI search functionality that summarizes lengthy policy documents and provides answers when employees have questions about their benefits.
• Deliver hyper-personalized experiences to employees. For example, a benefits adviser that helps employees understand and select the benefits that are more relevant to their individual circumstances.
• Speed up processes for your HR and reward teams. For example, a generative AI content tool that helps your teams create engaging benefits content in minutes (rather than hours).

Cultural fit is an often-overlooked aspect of finding the right partner for your global benefits rollout.

You want your provider to be a true partner in achieving your global reward vision.

Choosing the right cultural dynamic

“It was very important to us to have the dynamics right between the two teams because at the end of the day, in a global deployment we will spend a lot of time together,” said Magdalena Vintrova, international total reward director at Baker Hughes.

“When I evaluate partners, I don’t call them suppliers, I call them partners – because I want to feel that they are an extension of my internal team.”

Download the report to get everything you need to know to avoid an employee benefits technology implementation catastrophe, and stories from the people and benefits leaders who have got it right.