Ending the January Regret: A CPO on What Open Enrollment Actually Needs

Ending the January Regret: A CPO on What Open Enrollment Actually Needs 

Every year, employees sit down to make what they perceive to be a simple decision: choosing a health plan. Most of them do it in under 15 minutes, without any real support. What they don’t realize though, is that this choice could be one of the most consequential financial decisions they’ll face all year. 

Jeff Batuhan knows this better than most. As Chief People Officer at Tinuiti, he's seen firsthand what happens when employees don't have the guidance they need during open enrollment. But Jeff didn't just live with the problem, he pushed for a solution. About a year ago, he sat down with the HealthJoy team and told them about a missed opportunity: employees needed real guidance to choose with confidence during open enrollment, and the technology to deliver it in a meaningful way simply wasn’t there yet. Those conversations helped shape what has now become HealthJoy’s new tool: Enrollment Decision Support. 

We sat down with Jeff to hear the problem in his own words, what he asked for, what's changed, and what the future looks like. 

HJ: In your experience, what makes open enrollment so hard to get right?

Jeff: Open enrollment is one of those HR moments where every employee, regardless of role or tenure, has to make a real financial decision under time pressure, often without fully understanding the information in front of them. That mix of high stakes and low literacy is the core problem. Add in a distributed workforce across 49 states, a lean people team, and a two-week window, and you've built a system for confusion.

What does it look like when employees don't have enough support during enrollment? What are the downstream consequences?

Without real support, people default. They roll over what they picked last year even if their life changed or they copy whatever plan their coworker chose. They skip the HSA because the form looks complicated. Downstream, that shows up as a wave of benefits tickets in January and February from people who realize they're in the wrong plan or who get hit with costs they didn't expect because they didn't understand deductibles or network tiers. Life event confusion turns into missed enrollment moments, and unfortunately, we have to say no to people even when it's not their fault. Over time, that erodes trust in the company’s people team. If someone feels burned by their health plan, they usually don't separate that from how they feel about HR overall.

What were your biggest frustrations heading into open enrollment season?

Three things. First, our communication was always a one-size-fits-all approach. A 25-year-old single employee and a parent of three were getting the same open enrollment message. Second, bandwidth: my team can't give one-on-one guidance at scale to about 1,200 people across 49 states. We can't sit down with everyone or address individual situations on a group call. Third, we had almost no visibility into how people were actually making decisions. We could see what they picked, but not why or what made it hard, which made it difficult to improve year over year.

You were a big influence in shaping HealthJoy's Enrollment Decision Support product. What was that experience like? What did you tell HealthJoy you needed?

I had flagged this to the team about a year ago. I told them it felt like a missed opportunity. We were getting employees fully onto HealthJoy only after they'd already been hired and already chosen their plan. I wanted something simple that would meet employees at the very beginning of their journey, right when they're choosing benefits, not after. I didn't want a chatbot that assumes people will read a benefits guide. I wanted something that asks about their situation and gives a clear recommendation, not just more information. I'd used another decision-support tool before, but it was disconnected, a one-time-use thing that didn't tie into anything else. I wanted a system connected to everything else HealthJoy does, so there's real data behind it. Most employees' problem isn't a lack of information, it's a lack of confidence in how they make the decision.

What sold you on investing in Enrollment Decision Support specifically?

That it's personalized and tied to the entire benefits experience, not just the open enrollment window, but the other 364 days. I wanted fewer benefits-related tickets, higher HSA enrollment, and to stop being the ones people ask "what plan should I be on?" because really, it depends on their situation, and I don't want them coming back later saying "this is what you told me to pick." Freeing up my team's time and giving people confidence that they made the right decision for themselves, that's an unbeatable value.

What are you most looking forward to once this is live for your employees this enrollment season?

Watching ticket volume drop. If employees can get a confident answer without emailing us, that's the proof point. I'm also looking forward to feedback from employees on how they found the system, and to seeing whether people choose differently when they have real guidance instead of defaulting to whatever they picked last year. Longer term, having that data helps us be more strategic about how we design our plan offerings going forward.

What would you tell a skeptical HR leader about how technology can actually move the needle here?

The skepticism is fair. Nobody wants "another tool" or another portal no one uses. But that's not what a good decision-support tool is. The bar isn't whether it looks nice, it's whether it changes behavior — whether it gets people out of default enrollment and into the plan that actually fits their life. If it does that, it pays for itself in avoided tickets, avoided escalations, and avoided January regret, when people see a bill and realize they should have planned differently. My advice to anyone evaluating a partner: ask for utilization data and post-enrollment outcomes, not just a feature list.

What does a good open enrollment look like to you, and how do you define success?

Employees making an active, confident choice rather than a passive default or a change request later. My team spending open enrollment on strategy and communication instead of answering the same plan-comparison question time and time again. And employees feeling like the company actually helped them, not just processed them.

What do you think the future of open enrollment looks like?

Open enrollment needs to stop being a once-a-year event that employees dread and HR just survives. The future is guidance that's personalized by life stage and household situation, available year-round, tied to real usage data so plan design itself improves every year. Enrollment should feel more like getting advice than filling out a form.

What advice would you give other HR leaders heading into an open enrollment season?

Don't wait until the week before to fix your communication. Segment your messaging by employee situation if you can. Give people a way to get real answers to "what should I pick?" without it landing on your teams’ desk. And measure what happens in the 60 days after enrollment closes, not just the enrollment numbers on day one. That's where you see whether people made good decisions or just fast ones. Personalization is the key factor. And yes, people can dump their benefits package into ChatGPT, but it won't have the level of detail you'd get without pulling the actual SPD document and that's part of the real value.

“I'm genuinely excited to launch this with HealthJoy and to see how it keeps improving as we learn more.” 

Jeff's team goes live with Enrollment Decision Support this open enrollment season. If his story sounds familiar — one-size-fits-all communication, a team stretched too thin to give individual guidance, no visibility into why employees choose what they choose — it doesn't have to stay that way.

See how Enrollment Decision Support works