It's that time of year when the bulk of annual enrollments are coming to a close, and insurance cards are (hopefully) being prepped to send out. While it's easy to want to forget about benefits for a while and just bask in the "done-ness" of annual enrollment, now is also a crucial time to evaluate how your enrollment went.
What percentage of your employees enrolled? Were they satisfied with their experience? What were the snags? Were you satisfied with your experience?
If you weren't completely satisfied, you're not alone.
According to a survey reported by Employee Benefit News and Employee Benefit Advisor, 39% would like new benefits enrollment systems, 32.7% seek better benefits administration tools and 30.9% are planning to spend money on an improved employee benefits portal.
What does this tell us? There's a lot of unhappy HR professionals out there that know they, and their employees, deserve something better. If you are part of the 39% who is vying for a new benefits enrollment system, then congratulations! You've already taken the first step in realizing that things can no longer go on as they have.
What's next? It's time to brave the waters and actively seek what other options are out there. Typically, the first step in evaluating benefits technology services vendor is a request for proposal, better known as an RFP, which is simply an in depth set of specific questions that will yield meaningful information to help you gain insight and responsibly evaluate your potential vendors. The RFP process can be the start of a beautiful relationship between you and your benefits technology and services partner, and can plant the seeds for a long-lasting, mutually beneficial relationship with each other's best interests at heart...if it's done right.
If you haven't administered an RFP before, it can be difficult to know where to start. We get it--there's a lot of ground to cover, and it's easy to let questions be vague, but trust us--the RFP process in crucial and asking the right questions will start you off in a much better partnership with the vendor you eventfully select.
We know that choosing a new benefits vendor is hard, and we want to help make your journey as painless as possible. Our RFP team has compiled a "Top 7 Ill-advised RFP Questions" SlideShare as a resource to you that offers some of the most common foolish RFP questions for evaluating benefits technology and services vendors and suggests how better information could have been gained with better questions.
We want to help you on your quest to finding a better partner and hope that you can use this guide to write your best RFP to evaluate us, or any benefits technology vendor. So go ahead and begin your search for something better--you deserve it!
