Open enrollment is more than meeting with employees to help them choose a plan. It's making sure you understand each company’s goals and priorities, matching your offerings to their needs and helping them reach those goals in any way you can.
Don't just be a person who sells insurance. Become a dental benefits guru. Keep on top of trends, understand your audience and how best to communicate with them and help your clients offer the best benefits available with minimal stress.
Open enrollment takes a lot of planning. Be prepared with questions to ask the company’s HR team, helpful information about trends and compliance as well as information about any plan changes.
The most obvious step in preparing for your meeting is to know the plans that you're offering inside and out. Be sure to know of any changes to the plans that should be highlighted. To explain to your clients how much a situation would cost under each plan, you should play through several common scenarios such as:
Ask your clients about broader business goals. Perhaps they are planning to expand their company this year, change their technological solutions or make other moves that will affect their insurance processes and needs. Focus on the whole picture so you can help your clients make the best decisions now and in the future.
Look at what the spend is and if there are lifestyle indicators that may point to methods your clients can take to reduce the number of claims submitted—like a wellness program. The claims review may also lead to a conversation about whether the company should try self-funding (or even move away from self-funding). Be prepared to discuss a variety of ways to reduce claims costs when you meet with your client.
Many HR departments are overwhelmed. Insurance is just one of the many things they must juggle. Use this as an opportunity to become a go-to source for the latest information about dental insurance trends. For instance, you can share helpful statistics that will allow them to compare their benefits to the industry, like the Society of Human Resources Management's annual report detailing the trends in employee benefits Employee Benefit Advisor covering the importance of ancillary benefits. After reading reports like this, pull out important details to share that can help your client decide what benefits to offer to stay competitive with other workplaces.
A survey conducted by the Council of Insurance Agents and Brokers found that of the most important services that brokers perform is addressing compliance. Because of the constantly changing nature of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), companies are rightfully concerned about meeting all the requirements of the law. When building your plans, you should highlight which current regulations are being met and how the plans will meet future regulations (like the Cadillac tax).
Find out your client's pay schedule so you can answer questions about plan deductions from employees' paychecks. This can also change based on the different levels of benefits and employee classifications. Check with HR to see how they handle payroll deductions of benefits and whether they want you to address any related questions.
Talk to the HR team at each company about the makeup of their employees. Are there a lot of older employees? Perhaps younger employees? Maybe families? Are there any disabilities that may require extra research? Are there any special needs that you should be aware of? What unique scenarios should you be prepared for? For instance, employees who are constantly traveling or performing dangerous tasks.
Create both general and product-specific FAQs to include in your materials to give employees. Work with HR so you can include questions they often get from staff, like what to do if you miss enrollment meetings because of vacations, whether employees need to change their plans if they're happy and what the copayments are.
Send materials for the staff before the open enrollment meeting, so employees have time to review the plans and come up with questions beforehand. Make sure to include the FAQs and easy to understand summaries of plan changes. Also, include plan comparisons, so employees can clearly see the differences between their choices.
It's showtime! Whether you're presenting to a large company or a small one, the methods are the same. You should know all your available plans inside and out and be able to match different scenarios to the best plans. Be prepared, be personable and be available.
Different work schedules, meeting schedules and vacations make it difficult for every employee to be available at the same time for meetings. That's why it's important to hold several different meetings across several days at different times of the day. Offering different days and times should also keep your meetings smaller, which will allow you to spend more one-on-one time with attendees.
Yes, you already sent the materials in advance, but always have enough at the meeting to go around because most people won't think to bring their copy and some may not have seen the advanced copies.
Attention spans are short. Even when with the best of intentions, everyone's mind wanders as meetings drone on. Cover the most important points without overwhelming your audience. Also, try to find ways to break up your presentation to keep people's attention. For instance, you can break for questions several times, quiz participants or switch up how you present the information throughout the presentation.
When text is paired with a corresponding image, people are six times more likely to remember that information, so use large, eye-catching images, videos and graphics to capture interest and help your audience remember key points.
Everyone worries that they'll choose the wrong plan for their situation, so doing what you can to help people feel comfortable with their choice can make the process less stressful. Share statistics about which plans are most popular in certain scenarios. For instance, if you can tell employees that most people who don’t travel choose Plan A, while people who travel out of state choose Plan B, it can help them narrow their choices and soothe fears that they'll choose an oversized or undersized plan.
Insurance is an essential work benefit and it can be confusing. Make sure that you schedule enough time in the meeting to cover all your key points with the assumption that you'll get many questions. You never want employees to feel like they're being rushed or not getting the information they need. You should also schedule plenty of time after the meeting to take one-on-one questions.
When it comes to insurance, it's important that you be honest with your advice. Don't let your sales goals get in the way of the real purpose of the meeting, which is to ensure every employee gets the dental insurance that is appropriate for their life.
Employees are busy and may forget the most important detail of open enrollment—the deadline. Create a marketing plan to ensure everyone knows when the meetings are going to be held and the deadline date. Use posters, emails, postcards, social media posts and other communication methods to send advanced notice, reminders in between and last-minute warnings about the coming deadline. Sometimes a spouse is the family decision maker, so sending a notice to the home address is a highly recommended.
Record one of the meetings or create a video recording of what you intend to say, so those who can't attend the meetings can still access the information you will cover. The resulting video can be added to an internal website for staff or the link can be sent out in one of your reminder emails.
After everyone has chosen their plans and they're all set up, you should begin helping HR teams educate employees about their benefits. According to the International Foundation of Employee Benefit Plans, only 19 percent of employers feel that their employees have a strong understanding of their benefits. Most employees don't need to use their benefits right away, so it's easy for them to forget the ins and outs of their plans when they use their benefits. That's where you can help.
To communicate effectively, you need to understand how your employees would prefer to receive information about their benefits. According the Employee Benefit Adviser’s open enrollment readiness benchmark, many employers are very unprepared at solicitating worker feedback. Getting employee feedback and analyzing the data is imperative to make the next open enrollment more successful. Send out a short survey asking for their feedback on what has worked in the past, what could be improved and how they would prefer to get information about their benefits.
Using information from the survey, develop a communications calendar for the year. This way you will know what information to gather each month. The plan should cover when communications go out, what communication method you'll use and what topics you'll cover for each instance.
For large companies, it's important to vary the methods you use to communicate benefits. Videos are a great choice to reach audiences of all ages. Having a video library also allows your employee to access information about their benefits on-demand.
Other Potential Communication Methods:
Many companies have found success using employees in their company who are familiar with and have used key benefits to spread the word. Happy customers are often the best marketers for products, so why not use the same methods for "selling" benefits. Find a group of mavens to use word-of-mouth marketing to talk about their experiences using their benefits and encourage others to use theirs.
You, of course, understand all the insurance terms—it's your job—but for the average customer, those terms are confusing, intimidating and could be preventing them from fully understanding their benefits. When creating your educational materials, put your benefit explanations in easy-to-understand terms to prevent confusion.
Don't restrict communications to just the employees. Regularly send any pertinent information from industry newsletters or articles to the HR teams to keep them up to date on employee benefits trends and communication best practices. In your emails, include links to the original studies, articles and newsletters and create a bullet-pointed list of takeaways to save your clients’ time.
Open enrollment is busy, so it's important to have a game plan in place before it kicks off. Meet with HR early enough to help them decide which benefits to offer this year and be sure to gather all the information you need to make your open enrollment meetings go smoother.
Have as many meetings you need to reach everyone and make sure you have enough time to cover all the main points and answer questions. And don't let the engagement end after open enrollment. Continue to communicate to employees the value and importance of using the benefits they signed up for.
Open enrollment may cover a specific period, but the work to prepare and keep the buzz going is a yearlong endeavor. Once you understand this key fact and continuously do everything you can to help your clients meet their goals, then you will experience successful open enrollments year after year.
Dental is one of the most sought after parts of an employee benefits package. 68% of eligible employees choose dental, making it the most enrolled employee benefit after medical insurance. But clients and employees alike can struggle to understand what makes one dental plan different from another.
Download our FREE tipsheet to learn the 5 dental plan highlights to lead with so your clients will know what makes a plan better than the rest!