Enrollment technology with Sarah Oliver - Video transcript

The competitiveness of the benefits package is shifting a little bit. So it's not just about the financial elements of it. Employees really want to feel cared for. They want additional benefits. They want mental health and wellness benefits. They want their employer to really show that they're being considered as a holistic human. And when you think about how to make those benefits available to people, it's at the point of annual enrollment. It's at those qualifying life events for enrollments.

The process for people to be able to take advantage and even understand that they have these benefits available to them needs to be digital. It needs to be engaging. It needs to meet folks where they are. And so I think the role of benefits technology is significant, because they add a great intuitive technology platform, great intuitive or all-encompassing decision support, completely relevant as employers want to consider how best to communicate where they've invested on behalf of their employees.

Yeah, if you look back at the last decade, there's been so much advancement in terms of enrollment technology, right? Which of the different enhancements, innovations that we've seen over the last few years are you most excited about? And what do you see as really the greatest advantages of that technology for working Americans?

I love the elements of mobile. I'm fascinated by mobile just as a consumer. I don't fall into a millennial category. I'm a little older than that. But I still love to be able to sit wherever I want, be it having coffee, sitting on my couch, and do everything that I want on my phone. It's just a nice feature.

You can do things whenever you want, whenever the time is made available to you. So as a result of that, when I think about all of the enrollment platforms and decision support that has been made native to mobile, multiple languages, it's just such a great experience. So I would say the general theme is mobile.

But one of the partnerships that I'm super-excited about-- and we talked about it a lot this year-- is Nayya, where it really demystifies the decision process. And it allows, in a self-service, mobile-enabled environment, for users to get great information based on multiple dimensions of financial wellness and allows folks to take advantage of benefits and really make the right decision for them in whatever circumstance or environment that they would like.

So you mentioned Nayya. And in 2021, Guardian announced quite a few partnerships, Nayya being one of them, with various tech firms and ben admin firms, including API integrations, which enable real time connectivity. True game-changer for the industry, for plan setup, for enrollment. How are those technologies, and specifically API integrations, helping to improve the enrollment process, specifically for employers and their workers?

It's making us so much easier to do business with in general. I love what API is doing for the industry. We have some great statistics that our technology practice leads can rattle off. But taking processes that took weeks to hours. Hours worth of configuration in an EDI feed setup is now real time. It happens in seconds. And the ease of doing business, the reduction in error rates, the ability to get real time information is just really incredible.

And what I love also with just connectivity in general is the ability to plug-and-play whatever works best. So when you think about the technology that folks really want for their benefits enrollment, they want to be able to be on a platform. You can get the information to your carrier partners like Guardian within seconds.

And then also, you can add in other elements that can be connected by API, like Nayya. So Nayya is API-connected with multiple technology providers as well as Guardian. So everything is an information superhighway at this point and just leads to a great experience for everybody involved.

So for those employers who, in our poll, for example, said they really hadn't adopted a more digital enrollment process yet, thinking about 2022 and, in the beginning of the year, maybe starting their planning process, what one piece of advice would you offer to employers about getting started down that path of having a more digital enrollment experience for their workforce?

There are so many people in the process that are very well-positioned to help. So talk to your broker. Say that you want that type of experience. Your carrier partners, your brokers, everybody's very well-positioned to talk about options.

Our sales reps, the Guardian sales reps, I hear far and wide, they love to be able to talk about the technology that we have available. It is something that's pretty unique but growing in the market.

Your broker, most of them now, have technology options available that employers can take advantage of.

Yeah, just talk to your broker. Talk to your sales rep. They're eager to help you make that transition.

Well, Sarah, thanks for stopping by. Happy holidays. And looking forward to more enrollment tech innovation, no doubt, in 2022. And we're going to close this segment, actually, with a clip of you from one of our most popular webinars of 2021 about best practices in developing an effective enrollment strategy for your organization. So here goes.

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From an employee's perspective, it's extremely important to have a positive enrollment experience where it's not just something that they're forced to do and forced to go through, but it allows them to learn and take action on behalf of their family's financial picture.

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Really understanding the terms and having someone to talk to or having a recommendation made for you leads to a lot more confidence in the benefit decision because the folks will know what they're choosing and why.

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