I don’t know about you but with only two weeks left in the school year, I often find myself dreaming of what’s to come: long nights grilling on the patio, summer concerts on the lawn, and weekends spent cheering my son on at his baseball games.

But while a much-needed summer is just around the corner, so is Annual Enrollment. We are just four months out from our busiest time of year.

In thinking about what is needed to prepare for Annual Enrollment, there is a wealth of information and benefits insights that is often overlooked or not leveraged fully — your previous year’s results. It’s so easy to get caught up in the details of future planning or even sticking with the status quo, that we often forget to fully analyze and measure our success from the previous year to help drive strategy for the upcoming year. 

At the conclusion of every Annual Enrollment and during your planning phase, you should be immersing yourself in the data that is vital in your strategy for the next AE. Here are the types of questions you should be asking:

• What plans were selected the most?
• Did your workforce go for the low-cost option?
• Which voluntary plans saw the most success?
• What demographics enrolled in your medical plans and did salary, or other factors, impact the choice?

Another key to understanding your data is taking into consideration your employees’ risk tolerance and financial wellbeing, how they manage their healthcare decisions and what events they might be anticipating this year.

Robust reporting and analytics tools are a vital part of measuring your benefits strategy and ensuring you are providing the best plan options for your workforce, based on your organizational objectives. Plus, early adopters of online benefits platforms that collect a wealth of employee data have a more accurate picture of what their workforce needs. This data collection and analysis enables them to develop a more targeted and personalized benefits communication strategy.

At Businessolver, we understand not only the value of data, but the importance of accessibility. We continue to make a tremendous investment in our reporting and analytics capabilities to ensure clients can easily view and mine their data. For example, our platform users are able to:

• Access custom and standard reports: With hundreds of standard and custom reports, it is simple to generate meaningful data into easy-to-read formats. In addition, our Build a Report tool allows users to create their own reports on demand, with hundreds of outputs and conditions.
• View board-room ready results: Our analytics dashboards provide graphical views of important plan metrics. For example, users can discover the percentage of employees who enrolled in each plan, how demographics and salary impacted the enrollment, how much time was spent in the enrollment and more.
• Dig beyond plan participation: Our MyChoice Analytics provides tremendous insights into the employee population based on how they answered questions with our decision support tool, the MyChoice Recommendation Engine. With overall results on their financial security, their anticipated health and if they are willing to take a risk, the benefits team can make evaluations and build annual goals around that in order to support employee wellbeing.

We believe that data is fundamental to the ongoing management of benefits programs, and that benefits pros should have easy-to-use tools to access reporting quickly, without waiting for their AE debrief or their turn in queue with the data team. If you don’t have easy access to this level of information about your plans and population, it may be time to start considering the true value your benefits technology provider is really offering.

Need proof? Check out how this Businessolver client used our reporting and analytics tools to deliver on their benefits strategy.