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Saul Marquez:
Hey everybody! Saul Marquez with the HLTH Matters podcast. I want to welcome you to today’s episode and straight from the Las Vegas show floor, I have the pleasure of being with Crystal Brown. She’s vice president of Product and Strategy for Benefitfocus, a cloud-based benefits administration tech company serving health plans and employers nationwide. Crystal is a lead for all aspects of product strategy, roadmap development, and product execution for the full product portfolio of Benefitfocus. In the role, she ensures the viability, the feasibility, and desirability of the product offerings by tapping into the expertise of business leaders and keenly knowing the competitive landscape. Crystal brings with her 20-plus years of leadership experience spanning deep business acumen, user insights, and technical savvy, delivering product designs resulting in a compelling competitive advantage. Prior to the role, Crystal was vice president of strategic programs at Florida Blue. There, she was responsible for leading enterprise strategy roadmap development, and program execution for transformational initiatives in the areas of sales, engineering, clinical operations, and provider networks. I’m privileged to have her here on the podcast today and excited to dive into the work that she and the team at Benefitfocus are up to. Crystal, thanks so much for joining me today.
Crystal Brown:
Thanks for having me.
Saul Marquez:
So Crystal, for our listeners who may not know who Benefitfocus is, can you tell us a little more about the company?
Crystal Brown:
Yeah, absolutely, and thank you again for the invitation to come on with you and your listeners today. So Benefitfocus is a cloud-based benefit administration company. We’re committed to helping our customers and the people they serve get the most out of their healthcare and benefit programs. So we aim to do that by simplifying benefit administration and delivering an experience that engages people and just make it easier for them to achieve better outcomes.
Saul Marquez:
I love that. You know, it’s quite simple, but maybe not as easy. So it’s great that you guys are in place. We recently saw a press release announcing your product expansion into advanced engagement services. Can you tell us a little bit more about that and what made you decide to go in that direction?
Crystal Brown:
Yeah, so the recent pandemic really hurled the healthcare industry kind of into the eye of a perfect storm, right? The industry was already wrestling with affordability challenges before the last few years piled on with access issues, clinical staffing shortages, just resulting from talent wars, and the COVID-19 clinical fatigue. So employers and ultimately consumers are caught between inflation pressures and further rising costs for healthcare services. This is really causing them to revisit their current health and wellness programs. They’re looking for ways to drive greater value. Often in effective engagement strategies are cited as the critical link between those benefit programs and the meaningful outcomes they’re all seeking. So however, in our conversations with health plans and employers, we heard them express the challenges they continue to experience, both from a technology and a resource standpoint to really execute on those engagement strategies, and we just felt Benefitfocus was in a position to help our customers with those challenges. So Advanced Engagement Services is an enhanced automated communication solution to help our health plan and employer customers really connect with customers and employees to provide education, drive action more easily and just more efficiently with their employees and with their members.
Saul Marquez:
So why is engagement such a priority for employers and health plans today?
Crystal Brown:
You know, first, I would say engagement can really impact member health outcomes. In fact, disengaged members are often three times more likely to have unmet medical needs. They can be two times more likely to delay medical care. So by educating members, providing them decision support tools, and interacting with them throughout their customer lifecycle, you can help members make informed decisions about where to go to get care, how to get the most out of their benefit programs, and how to better manage their health. This type of engagement also significantly impacts healthcare cost. Second is we know that health plans are actively working to increase customer satisfaction. According to a JD Power study recently, health plans that proactively engage their members can see a potential 152-point increase just in overall satisfaction when they make proactive efforts to keep out-of-pocket costs low for their members.
Saul Marquez:
Thank you, Crystal. You know, this isn’t the first time we’ve been in conversations regarding engagement strategies and the continued challenges with them. Why do you think organizations continue to struggle with engagement?
Crystal Brown:
Yeah, you know, one of the most common challenges we hear from health plans is that there’s too many disparate systems and siloed customer experience. So prior to this role, I spent more than 20 years with a health plan, and I can speak firsthand for how much time we spent trying to connect a lot of systems, a lot of vendors, care programs, wellness programs, all trying to deliver this cohesive experience. For both health plans and employers, we also know that resource capacity to continuously build, launch, and monitor those engagement campaigns is also an issue. And then finally, one of the most common obstacles we hear about is incomplete data. You know, without accurate member data, it’s really hard to create personalized and meaningful communications. And for many of our customers, their biggest hurdle is just having really good contact data, whether it’s an email or a mobile number, to be able to reach those members in the way that they want to engage.
Saul Marquez:
Thank you for that. And so as you reflect on Benefitfocus, why do you think you guys are uniquely positioned to solve this problem?
Crystal Brown:
Yeah, so at Benefitfocus, we uniquely serve both health plans and employers of all sizes. And then additionally we offer services and technology that span quoting, enrollment, billing, and data management services, so as a result, we have millions of users that have captive moments within our platform every year. And because we already have the data in-house, we also can help our existing customers begin building and launching those campaigns almost immediately. They don’t have to contract with a new vendor. They don’t have to stand up a new integration. They can really work with us and we can scale very quickly based on those existing foundations with them.
Saul Marquez:
Sounds like it’s a pretty seamless fit and something worth checking out. What are some examples of the types of campaigns that health plans or employers could create using your advanced engagement services solution?
Crystal Brown:
Yeah, so there’s many use cases for both health plans and employers, but I’ll just touch on a few examples. The first one is member onboarding. So this really helps health plans and employers to get off on the right foot with members. It gives them the opportunity to provide members with the support and education they need right out the gate. It’s also a great opportunity to capture communication preferences and consent for ongoing engagement opportunities. You know, another example is benefit program adoption, health plans and employers can drive awareness, participation, and utilization of those wellness programs and their benefit programs, such as telemedicine, voluntary benefits, and disease management. And then finally, one of the more recent ones we’ve been working with some of our customers on is streamlining administrative task for both employees and HR administrators. Think about just the example of, you have an individual who’s given birth, they have a baby, they want to add them to their policy. They can easily take a picture of that birth certificate from their device, they can submit it, and without the need to log into a portal or download a mobile app, the technology can then systematically verify that image and automate that eligibility verification step, and it really takes that administrative burden off of the HR team. So these are just a couple of the examples, we’re in like a dozen conversations with customers right now, but those are just a few that we’re seeing most commonly show up.
Saul Marquez:
Yeah, thanks for that, Crystal. It sounds like you and the team there are really, you intimately understand the struggles and the challenges that your customers are facing and the health plan side, and you’ve put together a really intuitive platform that they could plug into and really just find simple ways to tackle some of the common challenges that they’re faced with.
Crystal Brown:
Absolutely.
Saul Marquez:
That’s great. Well, the press release also mentioned a partnership as part of your advance engagement services expansion. Can you share a little more about that?
Crystal Brown:
Yeah, I would love to, I’m most excited about this element of it. So we knew we needed an innovative partner really to enable us to bring a differentiated offering to our clients. We found that partner with Usher Technology, so they’re a leader in AI-powered customer experience automation. That’s a lot of words. They use a no-code AI-driven platform that really delivers a highly personalized digital experience in customer journey automation. It was through that partnership with Usher that we could deliver a secure, HIPAA-compliant password-free customer interface that enables a very frictionless digital experience, so really meeting the individual where they are, not expecting them to download something new, not expecting them to know a user ID and password, really meeting them where they are and making that experience as simple as possible, and it’s because of that it’s not yet another point solution. So for our customers, whether it’s our health plans or our employers, they don’t have to then stand up yet another point solution, it’s really kind of the connective tissue that orchestrates what they already have in play. So it’s just been fascinating to watch how that technology is enabled this strategy to really come to life very quickly.
Saul Marquez:
That’s fantastic, and these partnerships truly do make the difference when you find the right fit that helps you accelerate things that make a difference. And you’ve had this in the market for a few months now, how are your customers responding and what results have you seen?
Crystal Brown:
Yeah, so the response from both our health plan and our employer clients has been overwhelming. You know, engagement remains a top priority for them and they’re looking for a better solution what they have available today, one that is more flexible, it’s quicker to implement, and really has an ease of use that’s more in line with what their consumers are coming to expect. So one of the most powerful elements of our new offering is just the speed to market, I know I mentioned it, but I’m really going to bring it to life for you. So in our first month, we had a national fast food client of ours, you might like their chicken, we’ll just say, and they came to us with a need to transform their new hire onboarding experience. They were going through significant growth as an organization, standing up new locations every day, but they were also experiencing higher turnover based on just the labor wars happening right now. So they had this like just perfect storm of like new hire and onboarding needs. So they needed a more engaging, a lower cost onboarding for these new hires. And so within a matter of days, we will able to sit down with them, we designed a new hire onboarding experience, and we rolled it out within weeks, from start to finish, we had it in market. And so what we were able to do is really roll that out to more than 2500 weekly new hires that they were having. And then as a result, they were able to get rid of, they were seeing significant increasing in postage costs through their traditional methods of new hire onboarding, but they were also able to start monitoring real-time insights, things they couldn’t do with traditional channels. They could open click rates, they could monitor where the new hire navigated throughout the experience to see if maybe they needed to adjust their language or clarification and things like that. So we’ve really seen just a great response rate. They’re super happy. We’ve had a lot of fun working on that with them and it’s really turned into a great use case that we’ve been able to show to some other prospects and clients.
Saul Marquez:
That’s great, thank you for sharing that one. When you’re in a bind like that and you’re looking for a solution that could really help you tackle a problem when you need it most, that’s when you’re like, wow, thank God there’s a solution like this. So Benefitfocus, sounds like you guys came through on this one. If our listeners are interested in learning more, where should we direct them?
Crystal Brown:
Yeah, so for your listeners out there, I’d say we’d love the opportunity to discuss your vision for increasing engagement with the individuals you serve, whether you’re a health plan or an employer, whether you’re one of our current customers or whether you’re a potential customer, we’d love to partner with you to help you achieve those goals like we have with some of our existing customers. And if you’d like additional information, whether it’s on Benefit Place or our new advanced services, you can either schedule a demo with us, you can email us at sales@Benefitfocus.com. And then if you’re one of our existing clients, you can always reach out to your sales representative. We’d be happy to talk with you.
Saul Marquez:
Thank you, Crystal. I really appreciate you joining us and sharing more about Benefitfocus and the work you guys are doing to drive effective engagement for your clients today. It’s been a really insightful conversation.
Crystal Brown:
Awesome, well, thank you so much for having me. It was a pleasure speaking with you.
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