Open enrollment is among the most important periods in a year for brokers and benefits teams. It is when individuals can sign up or make changes to their health insurance. Since open enrollment occurs once a year except for individuals who meet certain conditions, agencies face an influx of inquiries and changes from prospective and current customers.
Therefore, it can be stressful and overwhelming for brokers and benefits teams who fail to prepare early enough. Of course, many companies won’t be opening enrollment periods for a few months. However, that’s not to say you can’t start preparing now. Benefits teams should take advantage of this time and start planning if they hope to deliver a successful and smooth open enrollment.
Here are three reasons why you should start preparing for open enrollment now.
1. Allows Adequate Time to Evaluate Offerings
When you prepare for open enrollment early enough, you get enough time to review the existing and new popular offerings in the industry. You can consider surveying or polling employees to establish the additional benefits they want. This will help you expand your options early enough and offer a plan that satisfies the employees.
There are many more benefit options today that have grown in popularity. Employees nowadays not only prefer standard health insurance offerings, but they could also be interested in alternatives such as individual coverage health reimbursement arrangements, flexible spending accounts, and non-insured benefits programs such as pet insurance, pharmacy savings card, and alternative medicine.
If you wish to introduce new offerings during the open enrollment, it will be good to first gauge employee interest in them. That is only possible when you start planning early enough before open enrollment.
2. To Promote Benefits in Advance
Benefits teams should not send information about their available benefit packages only during the open enrollment. The employees will simply have no time to review all of them and make an informed decision. Too much information sent at once overwhelms them, and most default to the previous year’s benefits.
Therefore, you must ensure that employees have adequate time to explore and understand the benefits. Encourage them to spend some time evaluating and choosing the benefits by sharing information about the offerings. Then, employees can have a full understanding before they choose.
For example, you can send frequent reminders about how to file a claim, update beneficiaries, or share real examples of the value of various benefits to individuals. Learning from other people’s experiences can also help employees understand how their benefit choices connect to their financial wellbeing. This way, they’ll feel confident as they go into the enrollment period.
One of the best ways to promote your benefits packages in advance is through a digital benefits platform like Benefits Zone. It gives employees a convenient way to research benefits whenever they want.
3. Handling Multiple Concurrent Open Enrollments
Benefits agents often have multiple concurrent open enrollments, and putting some work in on each now will help make the process easier when enrollment starts. The new Benefits Zone interface gives agents a case dashboard that makes it easy to manage multiple cases at once.
Open enrollment may seem to be an easy time for selling insurance, and it probably is, but it is also the most competitive. Granted, it’s a time when more people are shopping for health insurance.
To emerge at the top, you need to find ways to make the process as smooth and convenient for prospects as possible. Leveraging digital platforms such as Benefits Zone allows you to handle multiple concurrent open enrollments.
Prepare for Open Enrollment!
Embracing digital platforms such as Benefits Zone in preparation for and during the open enrollment is key to your success. It guarantees you a streamlined and successful open enrollment. Schedule a demo today!
