Annual enrollment is the biggest time of the year for you, so it’s the biggest time of the year for us, too. 

Like teams during preseason, we spend months planning and perfecting our playbook so we can perform at the highest-level for the Super Bowl (aka, AE) and see our clients named MVP.

Essential to a successful annual enrollment preparation: Completing a pre-mortem analysis, rather than a post-mortem one. 

Traditionally in a post-mortem, teams discuss a finished project’s points of failure in order to avoid the same mistakes next time. We flipped this exercise on its head, instead outlining potential inadequacies well before AE even started. With this level of forethought, we can work backward to create contingencies, strengthen quality escape processes, and (hopefully) avoid issues altogether.

While we’d like to think that this pre-mortem process creates a bullet-proof product, the reality is we’re all imperfectly human and mistakes are bound to happen in the middle of the game. This is why we conduct weekly systemwide audits through a process called the “goaltender.”

I’m mixing sports analogies here, but the goaltender is exactly what it sounds like: using audits to catch small quality escapes before they become big ones. Things like blank effective dates or other red-flag data issues can be investigated and corrected as early and efficiently as possible. 

This year, due to these two practices, we’re proud to host the most daily users the Benefitsolver® platform has ever seen—all without a single user experiencing a single second of system downtime.

We’re celebrating our first two days in November with a record-breaking 381,054 unique members navigating 28.1 million pages across Benefitsolver, seamlessly for our members without any service disruptions.

Thanks to a great amount of passion (and some caffeine) our system is always on. But being on isn’t about a stat, it’s about remembering that every number in every file represents a real person. A person we never want to let down.

Jaw-dropping user numbers like this only happen with one very important person: you.

HR and benefits pros like you know that annual enrollment is a marathon, not a sprint, so we want to encourage all you HR-athletes to take time to recharge.

Whether you need coffee (or something a little stronger) to help you power through the long days, or a way to relax and unwind at the end of them, there’s something for everyone in our AE Retreat. Escape to this virtual haven, our small way of saying thank you.

Cheers to a successful AE season!