Bukaty Increased Average Client Size by 49% with Employee Navigator

Challenge

Bukaty, is a Kansas City based agency with a focus on mid to large group corporate clients across all industries.  Bukaty had grown accustomed to the challenges that come with high-turnover clients that have not adopted to technology and the inevitable upkeep of managing both benefits administration and payroll systems. With so many moving parts, ensuring that midyear changes and periodic salary updates were reflected correctly in two separate systems became increasingly tedious.

Many of these clients largely relied on a paper enrollment process.  Bukaty’s desire to remain an integral part of the benefits management and service process, depended on a strong service staff to match demand.  Matt Miller, VP of Enrollment Service, explained that “previously we had to create templates to download and upload information on a weekly basis to insurance carriers.  This left plenty of room for errors and required quite a bit of manual intervention to create files and relay them to the various carrier systems.”

Employee Navigator offered Bukaty a solution to continue offering their unique brand of superior service but managed through a new, digitized, client experience. “We have historically processed changes for our clients manually. With the digitalization and automation that Employee Navigator offers, our clients now have the ability to make updates in one platform that communicates to all parties involved.  When we transitioned from paper enrollment to online enrollment, we were able to take a lot of that work off our clients’ plate,” said Matt Miller, “which has enabled us to offer a higher level of service to more clients.”

Differentiation through Digitization

Bukaty chose Employee Navigator for not only its packaged capabilities, but also due to the company’s vision for the future of technology. “I get emails from competing systems describing their bi-annual software releases,” said Matt Miller. “Employee Navigator updates their software almost weekly, and is constantly improving, those improvements are felt both by our staff and by our clients.”

By taking out the tedium of benefits administration and integrating with payroll, the agency can strengthen its value proposition and offer new benefits to employees that they previously wouldn’t have access to. “Automating and digitizing has made offering traditionally more complex benefits more palatable to clients as it does not require additional administration or hassle on their end.”

“Our average client size has increased by 49% since we started utilizing Employee Navigator. We’ve seen a similar increase in the number of lines of coverage offered per client, going from an average of 4 lines of coverage per client to around 8.” Matt Miller, VP of Enrollment Services, Bukaty

“We have a client with 1,000+ employees and 20+ sub-companies.  Utilizing the payroll integration has freed up the time of a Human Resource position that had previously been dedicated solely to data entry to be reallocated to more valuable Human Resources tasks.”

The move away from paper has allowed Bukaty to keep their strong emphasis on service while transitioning the focus of their own internal resources away from processing manual changes and to refocus on advising clients on their overall employee benefit package. “The integrations Employee Navigator has built allow us to spend less time tracking and communicating benefit changes and more time evaluating our existing block of business for gaps in coverage and additional opportunities to build out our clients’ overall benefits experience, without the added strain of administration with carriers and payroll companies. Technology is a necessary part of benefits administration, but it is still not adopted or embraced by many agencies which allows us to differentiate.”  Having a digital benefits dashboard with Employee Navigator allows year-round access to information on plans, claim forms, and support contacts, that was previously communicated just once a year.

Results

Bukaty is now able to offer clients a more comprehensive benefits package, which was not previously feasible due to the amount of administration involved before digitization. As part of their effort to modernize their clients’ benefits administration experience, it’s become essential to vet whether insurance carriers or payroll companies are integrated with Employee Navigator. “We have started narrowing down the vendors we commonly utilize.  Vendors must not only provide great plan value and pricing, but also integrate with Employee Navigator, which leads to more efficiency and reduced data discrepancies.”  The agency’s dedication to digitization has paid dividends.

“Of the 20 biggest clients that we’ve won in the last two years, Employee Navigator has been a deciding factor.” Matt Miller, VP of Enrollment Services, Bukaty

“Our average client size has increased by 49% since we started utilizing Employee Navigator. We’ve seen a similar increase in the number of lines of coverage offered per client, going from an average of 4 lines of coverage per client to around 8.” The increase in the average lines of coverage per client has helped us drive organic revenue growth at Bukaty, which we would not have been able to pursue without the payroll and carrier integrations from Employee Navigator. For Bukaty, Employee Navigator and its commitment to modern integrations are not only a differentiator but viewed as a necessity to effectively manage their block of business and continue to deliver their long-standing tradition and commitment to provide outstanding client service.