Do your employees currently enroll for their benefits using either of these methods? If they do, they’ll have no trouble at all acclimating to a web environment. In fact, it’s likely they and your HR staff will have an easier time than they would by messing around with papers and/or phone menus.

Built-in business rules ensure a high level of fidelity in each enrollment. Gone are the days of employees mistakenly opting for incongruous elections, or incorrectly adding up the total deductions cost. And if they need access to your company’s plan options, they have it! Online resources, including benefit guides and documents, are typically just a click away and easier to peruse with context sensitive search capability.

Making changes no longer equates to blurry eraser marks or dollops of whiteout clogging the page. In a web environment evidence of these changes are invisible, and they can be made at any time in the process. Furthermore, your employees are treated to a final review and confirmation page that they can keep for their own records. Even after they finish enrolling, the rewards don't stop. When they enroll next year, all of their previous information will still be there for each individual’s convenience.

All of this is well and good, but why should you believe us? Hewitt Associates, a benefits consulting firm, reported that in 2003 the percentage of employees choosing to enroll for their benefits via the Internet was 70%. Not surprisingly this has amounted to a reduction in the percentages of employees enrolling for benefits via IVR and call centers. A meager 8% enrolled through IVR compared to 30% in 1999. Call centers fared a little better, with year 2003 seeing a modest 23% enrollment rate, but still down from 34% in 1999. Clearly these trends wouldn’t exist if employees didn’t find the online process easier to understand.

But just how much easier to understand do they find it? And in what capacity? Hewitt’s data suggests that 93% of US employees enrolling for benefits online were satisfied with the experience. Ninety-five percent were also satisfied with the ease of enrolling and the time it took, while eight out of ten participants felt that they had access to all of the information necessary to enroll. Can your employees boast similar satisfaction levels regarding your current enrollment method?

The advantages aren’t restricted to your employees. HR administrators also benefit greatly from an online enrollment system. How? Well, for one, everything is legible which means there’s no scramble to decipher bad chicken-scratch. How many errors do you think this alone will resolve? Secondly, instead of rifling through reams of files and folders, they find an employee with just one click, as well as make status changes without sinking into the laborious paper process. Terminations, marital status, and new hires can all be done in near real-time. Another point to consider is that with an online system you are automatically covering your bases as far as privacy, HIPAA, and security requirements are concerned. We’re talking bare minutes as opposed to weeks. Which would you prefer?

Carriers will have cause to smile, mainly because they also realize that paper is fallible. Access to a complete online list of clients, employees, and elections lets them respond to and implement changes more efficiently. As a further bonus, a good system will customize the electronic transmissions for the carriers, a measure to ensure even more accuracy in the data.

Claiming your employees won’t understand how to use an online application is tantamount to saying they can’t write their own names, check boxes, or flip through printed material. The fact is, they’ll find online enrollment easier to understand, will enroll more quickly, and commit fewer errors. There’s nothing hard to understand about that.