We know that engaging and educating employees during open enrollment is one of the biggest challenges employers face with their benefits programs. After putting together a compelling suite of benefits offerings, it can be disappointing to find that employees aren’t sure what to enroll in and don’t feel confident about using their benefits. This is the problem Nayya is tackling with their innovative tool that helps employees choose and use their benefits wisely. We chatted with Aman Magoon, Head of Product at Nayya, to learn more about how they are improving the benefits experience for employees.
The Problem With Enrollment
Nayya reports that 81% of consumers find the process of picking insurance to be very stressful, and over 1 in 4 consumers actually regret the benefit choices they make. For those of us working in the benefits space, we all know that feeling when enrollment rolls around and co-workers start popping up asking for advice on what plan they should choose. Choosing the right benefits can be a complex and confusing process, and it can end up having big financial implications down the road.
How Nayya Helps Employers
Nayya helps employers by responsibly steering employees to plans with the coverage they need at appropriate costs. For example, that might look like helping employees figure out if they would benefit from a high-deductible health plan with an HSA instead of a more expensive health insurance plan. Nayya also reduces the overall burden of having to educate employees about their benefits, reducing employers’ administrative overhead and time spent.
How Nayya Helps Employees
Nayya helps employees understand how all their benefits work together. Health benefit decisions are complex because they need to dovetail with the employee’s healthcare needs. Questions about where to go for care, whether they’ll have access to their current providers and medication, and how much to contribute to an HSA are all part of the calculus that people have to do to choose and use their benefits.
That’s why Aman advises looking at benefits as a portfolio, but this is often hard for employees to do on their own. They need guidance to create a benefits package that has coverage and minimizes costs in the short-, medium-, and long-term, and interacts appropriately with their other savings vehicles and spending habits.
Nayya Choose and Use
Nayya has two key platforms it uses to help employees: Choose and Use. Choose is Nayya’s decision support platform. It is built into a company’s benefits administration platform so employees log in as usual to choose their benefits, but they see Nayya’s interface. Employees will go through a brief questionnaire to help guide their choices as they enroll. After answering the questions, Nayya will explain their recommendations based on their responses. Then employees can see the plans and enroll in the best one for them.
Nayya’s Use product kicks in once the employee is enrolled and active on the plan. It offers personalized, relevant, and actionable advice for employees. A big differentiator of the Use product is that it utilizes employees' actual claims experience to power its guidance. It’s not based on general personas, but rather based on the employee’s own historical claims patterns. It also uses machine learning to help guide recommendations in the future based on ICD coding. This all works together to help employees get value out of the products they are buying, and more importantly, it helps them get the healthcare they need to live a healthier and more productive life.
Engagement Tips for Employers
The biggest thing that employers can do to increase engagement is to meet employees where they are. Employees may not be using a desktop or laptop computer, they may only have phones, so they may prefer texting to email. Meet them where they are with a texting program. They may not be tech savvy. Meet them where they are with in-person sessions to review the benefits available and help them get enrolled online. Try posting a QR code in the cafeteria or break room so they can get to the enrollment site easily. Once you figure out where your employees are and accept that, you can effectively put plans into place to meet them there and engage with them.
What’s Next for Nayya
A lot of new companies have positioned themselves as having privileged access to data. Nayya views data as a commodity, not a competitive advantage. Everyone is going to have access to this data over time. Nayya is all about using data to engage employees with personalized service. Eventually, Aman sees Nayya moving into the payment space, so they’ll move beyond guidance for choosing and using benefits to simplify how employees pay for those benefits.
To hear more insights from Aman, including how the pandemic impacted Nayya, listen to Episode 29 of Better Benefits now. If you enjoy the episode, don’t forget to subscribe and leave us a review on your favorite podcast platform.
Aman’s Recommended Resource
On every episode of Better Benefits, we ask our expert guests for a book or resource they’d recommend to others working in the benefits space. This week, Aman recommended Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap and Others Don't by Jim Collins. It’s a well thought out and empirical study into what makes good companies great. Aman says the book is fascinating because its insights apply not only to day-to-day business, but also to personal life as well.
If you’d like to connect with Aman and the team at Nayya you can visit their website at Nayya.com. To learn more about Ansel, check out our plan and get in touch.
Note, this episode is for informational and educational purposes only. Aman Magoon and Nayya are not endorsed, affiliated with, nor compensated by Ansel Insurance Inc.
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