When your brokerage office offers ALEX, it’s a win for everyone on your team—strategy-minded leaders, account managers looking to add value for existing clients, producers hustling for new business, and communications strategists on the hunt for great tech to offer their colleagues.
Recently, we talked to four members of the Assurance Chicago brokerage team about their ALEX experience last year. Here’s what they told us.
“Our sweet spot is anywhere from 200 to 2000 employees. And I believe that because of the size of the group now, you have to bring something like ALEX to the table. We recently were up against another agency, and when we were looking at the demographics and makeup of the group, we needed to have ALEX in our arsenal in order to pitch a really thoughtful and strategic approach to how we’d engage their employees.
I’ve witnessed firsthand how ALEX resonates with our prospects and clients, and the value that it brings to their communication strategy and platform, especially with segmented, decentralized workforces. I’m hearing more and more about the need for people outside the organization to be involved in benefits decisions. Employees want to bring something home to their spouses, they want something that’s easy to understand and that they can be engaged with. And I’ve seen ALEX really be all about that.”
“In my role, I’m constantly trying to quantify ways that I can bring value to my clients. Having ALEX in place is a great way to dollarize value, because you take your HSA utilization, and the migration you got from a higher cost plan, and you can easily quantify what that saves the client.
ALEX has also made our lives so much easier during open enrollment. Before, we’d get in the car and drive and sit at a client’s job site for days and days to catch their full population or have a Webex broadcast across multiple sites, where you’re not even sure anyone’s listening. Now, so many of the things we created historically for clients we don’t have to spend our time and effort on, because we can leverage Jellyvision.
For example, we have one client where we were creating a full-blown new hire orientation video that talks to everything really high level, almost like a canned open enrollment meeting. But we were able to stop doing that when we started offering ALEX, which is great. ALEX was so much more intuitive because it actually spoke to the specific needs of what each individual was looking to get educated on. And then we’ve noticed our open enrollment meetings cutting back as well, because we’re saying to clients, ‘Hey, there’s no need for us to come speak to the masses.’ So it’s reduced the amount of enrollment meetings, too.”
“Outside of open enrollment meetings, which generally only attract 20% of employees, we’re left with 80% of employees not having any guidance on what decisions they’re making for them and their families.
So if we want to roll out a long-term strategy, we need to have a tool that can assist in making sure the employees are in the right plans. And you’d be hard-pressed to find a situation where an HSA plan isn’t the best plan, right? But the only way that you’re having those conversations is if you have that attention of the employees, or you have that willingness to sit down with you. ALEX provides that extra piece of consultation for the people that we can’t get to. And that’s huge.
I like to say to my clients that ALEX is like buying insurance for proper plan selection. And for us, of course, ALEX helps out because it’s a technology tool that’s a differentiator. But it also resonates with the finance people at a client. They say to us, ‘Well, how are you going to pull off getting folks into an HSA plan? Or how are you going to pull off making our employees engaged or better consumers?’ And ALEX serves as the backing and the meat behind what we’re pitching. It shows them how we’re going to accomplish it.”
“The reason why ALEX has been such a huge help to us is the decision support aspect, obviously, and helping to drive awareness around what plan is not only best for you, but for you and your family. So not only the plan itself, but the costs associated with that plan. As a person who’s led up communications at Assurance, that has been huge for me to talk about, because the missing piece is helping people close the loop. And ALEX just does a great job of helping them with that.
ALEX gets into the weeds, understands the person and their circumstances, then drives somebody towards the plan that fits best. And that’s not something that I can do as a human being without taking the time to paper and pencil out what the cost would be over the long term. It’s a more arduous process for me than it is for ALEX. He can just get it done!
And while I think ALEX is great for open enrollment, I’m a huge proponent of the overall usage of him, year round, as part of the onboarding process, because that clear, consistent message shouldn’t just die after open enrollment.”