Challenge
Faced with a growing demand from their customers for online enrollment and increasingly sophisticated competition, Caravus knew they needed a benefits administration solution, but needed a long-term partner who shared their strategic goals. “There are a lot of good technology companies offering valuable products and services to HR,” said Jesse Sitze, Caravus, “but they don’t understand the benefits side of it.”
Prior to finding Employee Navigator, Caravus was using an offshore team to manually process all employee changes for their clients, which proved not only expensive but also administratively complex. Furthermore, it was nearly impossible to realize an increase in enrollments for ancillary benefits by using paper.
“As a broker, your technology partner has to deeply understand employee benefits to build a technology around it and that’s when the light bulb went off and we set up a call with Employee Navigator.” Jesse Sitze, Caravus
These issues prompted Caravus to accelerate their search for a technology partner, ultimately settling on Employee Navigator. “As a broker, your technology partner has to deeply understand employee benefits to build a technology around it and that’s when the light bulb went off and we set up a call with Employee Navigator.” Caravus understood that investment in technology was both a requirement to remain competitive and a differentiator to drive growth.
Deploying Employee Navigator
After settling on Employee Navigator, Caravus knew they needed to go all-in, building an in-house team dedicated to technology to provide the high-touch service that is now synonymous with their name. Beyond the investments Caravus made internally around technology, Employee Navigator’s modern carrier integrations enabled them to further simplify their internal processes by eliminating most of the manually intensive eligibility management processes the Caravus team had been responsible for. “As we turned on more carrier integrations, we could see our manual work decrease; it has been a no brainer for us to continue down that path.”
“With the 300+ integrations that Employee Navigator has the manual work our team does for our customers has been cut by 60%, and it could be a lot higher.” Jesse Sitze, Caravus
“Prior to using these integrations, our customers would miss benefit updates and only be alerted to a problem when they noticed their costs were incorrect.” While getting started with integrations can be daunting, the Caravus team understood that you must start somewhere because “you never are going to get all the knowledge about anything before you do it, and so we leveraged the support of Navigator. The whole team is knowledgeable and provides great service.”
In the end, says Jesse, “Employee Navigator has allowed our clients to feel more comfortable offering more benefits because the admin work essentially goes away and there’s no added burden to the employer. Integrations allow our clients to increase retention and employees to feel better taken care of – all with no added work for us.”
From Data Processors to Data Managers
For Caravus, leveraging integrations with existing clients allows them to provide a differentiated customer experience, which has unsurprisingly resulted in increased client retention. “We looked back across all our groups over a 12-month period and calculated we had 27,000 changes outside of open enrollment. With Employee Navigator’s integrations we were able to achieve a 99.5% accuracy ratio where we see EDI running at 93%.” These days, everybody has technology, but it’s not all created equally.
“Integrations allow our clients to increase retention and employees to feel better taken care of – all with no added work for us.” Jesse Sitze, Caravus
By positioning the software as a central data hub that can reliably connect all of HR’s disparate systems, Caravus is able to own the narrative, win new clients, and maintain their reputation as one of the nation’s premier agencies.
