Why benefits advisors can't forget about their own employees' expectations

When you hear about providing a digital experience through technology, it is generally in the context of your employer clients. But today’s competitive landscape and client expectations have pushed many agents and brokers to adopt client-facing technology, such as client portals and mobile apps. While delivering on clients’ expectations for digital experiences is important to a company’s growth, businesses forget to consider another critical component: their employees’ expectations for digital capabilities.

For too long, benefits advisors have relied on traditional, manual processes to model and compare benefit plan options, taking time away from the true value they provide by being a trusted advisor to their clients. For example, our company primarily used spreadsheets for years to create plan comparisons. Having been in business for several generations, we have seen the insurance industry transform and we have changed along with it, adopting tools to reduce the time and complexity caused by manual spreadsheets.

Before we dive into the digital transformation of benefits plan design and quoting, let’s first discuss the challenges our team ran into with the traditional process.