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How Our Benefits Wallet Engages Employees

Picture of Claire Wiseman Imber Claire Wiseman Imber : December 15, 2021

Employee Healthcare Healthcare Costs

How Our Benefits Wallet Engages Employees

Building a genuinely satisfying employee benefits package is at the top of every HR professional’s mind, but getting there is harder than ever before. With healthcare costs rising, a global pandemic stretching into its third year, and a tight labor market, curating flexible benefits that focus on employee wellbeing could be a key differentiator when it comes to employee retention and recruiting. But no matter how forward-thinking your offerings might be, a lack of employee engagement will doom your best cost-containment efforts. Without proper navigation tools, employees who don’t understand their benefits won’t utilize them — leaving them unsatisfied, confused, and likely to delay care. For instance, we found that among the 1,600 employer-insured individuals in our 2021 Employee Benefits Insights Survey, 40% delayed care last year because they didn’t know what was covered.

Engagement is, first and foremost, about awareness. Our benefits wallet can help solve your low employee engagement issue while providing navigation support to bolster their benefits understanding.

How Our Benefits Wallet Works

Along with JOY, our AI-powered virtual assistant, the benefits wallet pulls employees into the app and drives them to interact with all their benefits.

The benefits wallet is a digital representation of an employee’s plan details, laid out like a wallet. We designed it to operate much like Apple’s popular wallet feature, so it’s familiar to smartphone users right away. Instead of seeing credit card details and airline tickets, your employees will see a card for every benefit on your plan.

The benefits wallet is a digital representation of an employees’ plan details, laid out like a wallet. We designed it to operate much like Apple’s popular wallet feature, so it’s familiar to smartphone users right away. Instead of seeing credit card details and airline tickets, your employees will see a card for every benefit on your plan.

Our team will create a unique card for each of your employee benefits. You’ll see cards for your EAP, telemedicine benefit, medical insurance, and dental plan. Each card will include whatever plan details you elect to display, but typically shows a short description of the benefit, contact numbers, deductible or copay amounts, and a button to tap through for quick access.

The benefits wallet integrates financial account information as well. Employees can connect their 401k, HSA, FSA, HRA, and more. With near-real-time updates, any worker can quickly see where they stand with just a few taps.

The unique layout of our benefits wallet not only increases employee engagement, but reduces the questions your HR department usually fields about plan details. That can translate to hours saved each week.

Engaging Employees With Our Benefits Wallet

Our benefits wallet builds awareness through accessibility. Once employees go through open enrollment, they lack support to use their benefits. It can be difficult or even impossible for them to rifle through the maze of phone numbers, contact points, and plan details they need to access them. These are usually offered in printed benefits booklets, PDFs, static websites, or Ben Admin portals that do nothing to support the user. By centralizing all your employee benefits in a connected app, we’ve eliminated this frustrating process.

We see several significant benefits with this approach:

We help your HR align with employees’ preferred communication channels. In our 2021 report, employees told us how they wanted to view their benefits communications: 28% ranked an app as their No. 1 preferred method, while 23% said they preferred email.
We can quickly update benefits off-cycle. A change in your benefit plan design creates confusion and questions for HR. We eliminate this problem by keeping plan details updated in the benefits wallet, even when they change mid-year.
We track wallet views as an early indicator of utilization and engagement. Among the many metrics tracked within our client Dashboard is wallet views. See precisely how often employees use this feature. We think you’ll be impressed!
Year after year, employees enjoy the same experience regardless of their plan benefits.

Instead of relying on the location of our benefits wallet to pull in users, we combine it with AI technology to drive up utilization. Regular communication sent to their mobile devices — like those offered in our JOY Campaign Journeys throughout the year or custom campaigns through Broadcaster — can help increase awareness.

These campaign journeys might guide members through linking their bank account or remind them about upcoming wellness initiatives. Once they’re in the app, they’re just a few taps from our benefits wallet and all the resources at their fingertips.

The Power of a Benefits Navigation Platform

The benefits wallet is just one expression of HealthJoy’s intuitive, connected approach to healthcare navigation. Combined with our communication tools, live support, self-service care navigation tools and suite of virtual care solutions, our platform increases engagement with all your employee benefits and helps your people access high-value care.

This post was originally published in January 2020. It was updated in December 2021.