3 Customer Service Attitudes Your Ben Admin Vendor Should Have

During annual enrollment and year-round, you want to partner with a vendor that understands the importance of an excellent enrollment experience. To achieve this, you must not only look at the technology platform they offer, but their customer service priorities and values as well. As your organization goes through annual enrollment 2023 and looks ahead to the remainder of the year, here are 3 customer service attitudes your vendor should have.

1. The voice of the customer should be their top focus

The voice of the customer (VoC) is far and away your benefits service vendor’s most powerful metric. In essence, the VoC is a collection of data points that provide your vendor visibility into customers’ friction points, opportunities for enhancement, and ways to improve overall customer experience. For example, at bswift, our Service Center gathers VoC data via post-call surveys to help measure employee satisfaction. Our client teams also gather feedback via the Net Promoter Score (NPS) Survey, developed by Bain Consulting which influences our technology and service investments and helps us spark meaningful discussions with clients around service delivery.

By partnering with a vendor who listens to the VoC, you will be working with someone that values an intimate understanding of what their customer service does well, and, in turn, knows where to seek improvements. When choosing a benefits service vendor, make sure listening to the VoC is their number one priority. Think of the VoC as a lighthouse in the fog: without it, not only does your vendor lack direction, but a destination as well!

2. Customer service and benefits technology should be a seamless experience

You want your employees to use customer service when they have questions during their enrollment experience, or year-round as they engage with their benefits. The best way to achieve this is by making sure your enrollment technology and service experience align. After an employee interacts with their benefits platform, such as through enrollment, viewing educational videos or interacting with a virtual assistant, calling their benefits service center needs to feel like a continuation of that experience. The tone of your vendor’s representatives, and their attention to detail, should seamlessly combine with the platform to create a single and continuous customer service experience.

3. When your employees engage with the service team, it must feel personal

Annual enrollment can be a tricky time for employees. Making decisions for an entire year isn’t a simple task, and with such a large array of possible benefits and combinations, it’s easy for employees to feel overwhelmed. It is paramount that you partner with a vendor that understands the level of compassion customer service requires. When on the phone or through online chat, your vendor’s representatives should handle each customer as if they were a good friend or dear family member in need of help, taking their time and patiently working through their problems with understanding and positive support. In addition, it’s essential for representatives’ tone to align with the employer’s culture and voice. This ensures the interaction feels just like an extension of the employer’s HR team for the employee. At the end of the day, your vendor’s primary goal is to make the customer service experience as easy and stress-free as possible.

Customer service is a vital part of delivering a smooth benefits experience during annual enrollment and year-round. bswift recently received an A+ rating from the Better Business Bureau – watch our video to see the steps we take to create a personal service experience for our customers.

View video transcript

Jamie: (00:08)
Riverside’s mission is to care for others as we care for those we love. Being a healthcare organization, we have to live our mission. We have right at 10,000 employees. Our prior vendor was not able to meet our needs. It actually cost us money because that vendor did not have the customer service and the client experience savviness as bswift.

Tracey: (00:32)
We keep the customer experience at the center of everything that we do. We call ourselves a service center. We’re not a contact center, we’re not a call center.

Aaron: (00:42)
We don’t want to put a time limit or a time cap on your conversation. We’re more so worried about the experience.

Jamie: (00:51)
The reason that we chose bswift was the customer service experience that our employees would receive.

Tracey: (00:57)
Who we recruit and how we recruit, how we train, how we performance manage. It’s all critically important for us. It’s our passion and what drives us each and every day. We hire compassionate people and work with trusted partners who have an innate need to please. They deliver confidence and they’re problem solvers. They really listen to the voice of the customer.

Samantha: (01:23)
Every call to me is personal because I think of it as what if it were my sister or my grandmother, you know, calling because they had a problem with their coverage?

Chad: (01:33)
We take pride in the fact that we can actually help in a system like healthcare, where it’s so extensive and confusing and hard to understand.

Aaron: (01:41)
Sometimes it’s not the question that they ask, but maybe it’s the question that they don’t know to ask.

Chad: (01:47)
I wanna be able to make sure I get right answers and I wanna make sure I provide those answers the way I would expect to get them.

Jamie: (01:53)
Once we got through the first full open enrollment, it was so much smoother. We had received tons of comments from our employees and several of our VPs to say this was so simple. It’s just completely different experience than what our employees had before.

Tracey: (02:08)
Did we provide the information they needed? Did we get to the unasked question? Did we make them feel good about the interaction? And if the answer is yes, we did our job.

Samantha: (02:21)
I want to bring that comfort and that assurance that by the end of this call, I’ve done everything you’ve needed. I want them to feel like they’re not calling a service center. I want them to feel like they’re calling their friend, Samantha.