It is common for employees to be frustrated, overwhelmed, or confused when selecting their benefits. With so many options available, employees find it challenging to understand their choices and make confident decisions. Fortunately, with employee decision support tools, employers have a better way to help their employees with these decisions. This article discusses why using employee benefits decision support tools is essential.
What are Decision Support Tools?
A decision support tool is software that assists employees with their benefits decisions by providing educational information and personalized benefits recommendations based on a person’s input and individual situation. It is part of a business intelligence system, such as benefits administration, or ben admin, that creates an interactive resource to keep employees more engaged than print or static resources and helps them make informed decisions.
Here’s how a benefits decision support tool works:
- An employee answers questions about their expenses, household, and benefits goals.
- The tool then educates the employee on their options and provides tailored suggestions based on their provided information.
- The tool then guides the employee through the process of optimizing contributions.
- The employee then uses the recommendations to select the benefits that suit them best.
Benefits of Decision Support Tools to Employers
- The tools improve benefits enrollment rates by helping employees choose the right benefits, improving employee satisfaction.
- Employers benefit from reduced costs since they only pay for the necessary employee benefits.
- The tools improve employee retention since employees are more satisfied and happier with their benefits.
Benefits of Decision Support Tools to Employees
- Employees better understand the company’s benefits packages and what the benefits offer during the benefits enrollment process.
- The tools save time since employees spend less time researching and considering the options available.
- Employees save money since they only enroll in the benefits that make the most sense for them.
Choosing a Decision Support Tool
Employees will make informed decisions when choosing their benefits using an interactive and credible tool to guide them toward personalized recommendations. Here is what employers should look for in a benefits decision support tool.
- Ease of use when employees engage with the tool. The decision support tool should be part of, or integrated with, a simple to use, concise, interactive, benefits administration platform, and able to provide immediate feedback. The decision support tool should also have options to edit employee data and provide clear recommendations based on the data received.
- In what ways does the tool offer a personalized and unique experience? Employees may not always remember their expenditures on previous years’ benefits. Having a ben admin tool that loads previous years’ information or populates data fields based on known employee data and incorporates a cost estimate for each employee gives them an accurate starting point for what they expect to spend.
- Is the tool transparent, credible, and trustworthy? This is important because the decision support tool aims to help an employee make informed benefits decisions. If employees do not trust the tool’s recommendations, the experience will not be beneficial and the employer will lose credibility.
- Does the vendor offer support for reporting and implementation? Choose a vendor to set up the ben admin and decision support tools and track its success. The tool’s analytics shouldn’t just show the number of users who accessed the software. It should focus on how employees use the tool and whether they choose the right benefits.
- Is the vendor trustworthy, secure, and experienced? The benefits decision support tool handles sensitive data from employees. Ensure the vendor is experienced in the field and has up-to-date security certifications to protect user data.
The Verdict
With benefits decision support tools, employees have access to the guidance and education required to make an informed decision on their benefits. The tools help to reduce anxiety and confusion around choosing benefits while improving employee satisfaction with their benefits.
Selerix is a leading provider of benefits administration solutions for organizations and businesses. Our ben admin platform offers benefits decision support to empower employers and employees and ensure everyone gets the right benefits. Contact us today for more information on our solutions.
