Mobile Experience with Benefits Administration

If your company isn’t keeping up with the digital trends of mobile access to systems of all kinds, you risk alienating the growing number of employees in the digital age of the twenty-first century who expect it. The mobile experience must be offered alongside the traditional desktop access, and this includes employee benefits administration tools not only for the employees but also for your HR team. LHD can help businesses keep pace with the mobile access demands of the digital age.

The Twenty-First Century is a Mobile-First World

As just one example, the University of San Francisco offers a Master of Science degree in Digital Health Informatics. In an overview of the degree, it notes the following: “…one of the most important and common ways that most people interact with information, including digital health information, is through mobile devices: smartphones and tablets. These mobile devices are displacing traditional desktop computers and laptops, a trend that was not apparent even five years ago.”

Back when cell phones became all the rage, the basic idea was simple enough, allowing people to make and take a phone calls on the go. Today, however, the phone call function of smartphones barely even registers with many people. Most won’t even answer a call if they can’t immediately recognize who the caller is. The smartphone, however, has become the go-to device people rely on in their daily lives. A few years back the World Economic Forum documented this with a survey that found fully 50% of respondents were more concerned about forgetting their smartphone than their wallet or purse, and only 14% were using them primarily for calls and messaging. Smartphones are displacing all kinds of other devices, including landline phones, GPS devices, digital cameras, portable music players, and even gaming consoles. After all, why have all those different devices when your smartphone can do them all?

Now that Millennials are 35% of the workforce (a figure that will increase to 75% by 2030), it’s time for more companies to align with them and the generations coming up behind them in terms of mobile device usage and access. A company that doesn’t anticipate and account for this in the coming years will see employee engagement plummet, plain and simple.

Employee Benefits Management Tools and the Mobile Experience

Given the rising expectation of mobile device access to benefits management for employees as well as benefits administration for HR teams, employers are now seeing the mobile experience not as a “nice-to-have” item on a to-do list but as a “must-have” priority item to be implemented ASAP. Everything an employee needs to do related to their benefits, including shopping, enrollment, renewal, and ongoing participation, must work beautifully whatever device is being used, whether it’s a desktop computer, laptop, tablet, or smartphone. The same goes for a seamless engagement in benefits administration and management tools from the human resource perspective.

For employees, the system and the platform must allow for easy benefits shopping, facilitate interacting with decision support tools, allow engagement with educational materials, and make required documentation uploads as easy as snapping a photo of a document with a smartphone’s camera. In this sense, the employee is a customer, and the mobile benefits management experience must meet their customer service needs with both convenience and care.

LHD: Your Benefits Partner for High Performing Plans

Mobile-enabled capabilities in your company’s benefits administration technology should be front-and-center right now if it’s not already. At LHD we take an integrated strategic approach to designing, implementing, and evaluating the ongoing performance of each client’s benefit plan, including both health benefits and retirement benefits.

A business needs peace of mind that its benefits are in good hands. LHD has deep expertise in all aspects of benefits advising and administration that gets results and exceeds expectations. The secret of our success is working with each client in a collaborative framework based on mutual trust and understanding, being relentless in our pursuit of excellence in customer service, and leveraging big data into actionable insights that inform the business decisions behind benefit plans and offerings.

LHD is ready to help your business fully embrace the digital age of the twenty-first century and the mobile-first world by setting up your company’s benefits administration tools to include a best-in-class mobile experience for both your workforce and your HR team. Start the conversation about your needs by getting in touch through the Contact page of our website, calling us directly at 371.751.7049, or sending an email to lhdbenefits@lhdbenefits.com.