Last month's column introduced the importance of PaaS—People as a Service. It's a concept that can easily be lost in today's environment of cool tools providing services on the web or in apps. The most satisfying service experience for customers usually lies in their positive reaction to the personal service they received.

Let's discuss PaaS in the voluntary benefits market. The big trends in the past few years in the voluntary business have been:

• Product proliferation

• Enrollment via systems that are increasingly self-administered by employees (ie: private exchanges, benefit administration systems or just voluntary enrollment systems)

• Economic and demographic diversity and the need to communicate in different ways to different audiences.

You might observe that, in fact, the second item is all about technology. In addition, these systems enable the use of multiple products, delivered in multiple ways to diverse audiences. All of these trends show they are examples of the use of software as a service.

While that may be true, the fact (according to Prudential research) is that when employers are asked what employee benefit communications methods result in the greatest degree of success, the top two methods were group meetings and seminars (74 percent of surveyed benefits managers) followed by individual one-on-one meetings (72 percent).