Last year, Tiffany Payton—a client service executive at Marsh and McLennan Agency (MMA)—was hunting for a different voluntary benefits (VB) carrier for her client, a California-based car manufacturer. Over the previous three years, MMA’s VB carrier tried to boost VB education by enlisting the help of both an onsite counselor and a call center. However, according to Tiffany, “the results were abysmal”: an average VB adoption rate of less than 3%.
Determined to improve those numbers, Tiffany and her client’s HR team looked into new carriers and decision support strategies. Ultimately, they chose ALEX after seeing a pitch by Jellyvision—and after Hartford Insurance, the carrier that suggested ALEX, offered to help cover the cost.
With help from Jellyvision’s implementation team, Tiffany and her MMA colleagues built the ALEX DIY conversation days before her client’s November open enrollment. A month later, Tiffany called her contact at Hartford to see how things panned out on the VB front.
What he said surprised her (in the best possible way):
- Despite being completely optional, ALEX saw 635 visits from a workforce of 707—a usage rate of nearly 90%
- The adoption rate for Hospital Indemnity—a brand-new benefit—was 17%, far exceeding expectations
- And best of all: with ALEX, enrollment in Accident, Critical Illness, and Voluntary Short-Term Disability grew from 65 to 601 employees year-over-year—an increase of 843%
“We knew we would do better,” Tiffany says, “but these results were incredible. I mean, it was just miraculous.”
Tiffany credits this success to two things: • The ALEX Benefits Sneak Peek video the client’s HR team sent out before open enrollment to promote ALEX Benefits Counselor • ALEX’s clear, interactive approach to decision support, which kept her client’s employees engaged, let them dig into the details as much or as little as they needed to, and gave them a personalized recommendation.
“The results we saw with ALEX certainly increased our revenue on the account overall,” she says. “After this happened, I told my colleagues about our success. And now we’re all excited to go into this upcoming year and see what we can do differently.”
