How to Improve Your Open Enrollment Period Using Better Communication (Guest Blog)

Solid communication between your HR department and your employees is critical when you plan to have a successful open enrollment period. While email communication may still be part of your overall strategy, text messaging offers you a more direct, instant way to get the attention of your workforce. You can use texting to send out reminders, set up meetings, or provide further information regarding various plans your employees are eligible for. When you implement text messages as part of your overall communication strategy, you are going to see your open enrollment period go more smoothly.

Remind Employees that Open Enrollment is Going On

Although you might send out a text message to your employees that open enrollment is going on, this is usually not enough to get people to sign up for benefits. Remind employees through a quick text message to keep people on task. You can set up your system to remind the employees that haven't signed up for benefits while leaving those that have already signed up for benefits alone.

Share Information About Various Benefit Plans

Improve communications with text messaging and you will see your entire open enrollment process go more smoothly. You can send out links to further explain benefit plans, making it easy for your employees to refer back to texts to research benefits. The ability to send links to your employees that are going to be received within a few minutes is invaluable during the open enrollment period and beyond. Text messages are read 98% of the time, so it is a reliable way to reach the vast majority of your employees.

Answer Frequently Asked Questions Automatically

Your HR department spends unnecessary time answering questions when you don't have an automated system in place. Once you implement text messaging software, employees can text in questions to receive an automated response. For example, if an employee wants to know when the next meeting is to talk about benefits, they can simply text "SCHEDULE" or a similar keyword, and receive an automated message with the next meeting date and time.

Keep Messages Personalized with Texting

You can create groups that you send out text messages to based on a variety of demographics. For employees that haven't signed up for a meeting yet, you can send out a reminder text to schedule a benefits meeting. For those that haven't completed paperwork, another text can be sent out to that group encouraging people to finish their paperwork.

Schedule Employee Meetings Through Texting

If employees must sign up for a meeting to complete benefit paperwork, you can set up meetings using text messaging. Once a meeting is scheduled, you can remind your employee of the upcoming meeting the day before, an hour before, or even a few minutes before the meeting is about to start. This will reduce the amount of time your HR department wastes when people forget to attend their benefits meeting.

Gather Feedback from Employees

Once the open enrollment period is over, send out a quick survey to your employees to see how the process could be improved. This should be done shortly after the period ends so that the experience is still fresh on everyone's minds. Gather feedback and make changes to the process for the next year according to the feedback you receive.

Your open enrollment period will improve when communication is streamlined. SMS gives your HR department the ability to reach your entire workforce within minutes. Questions are easy to answer, and it's simple to set up meetings between employees and HR.

For more information on how text messaging can help improve communications during open enrollment period, click here!

Author Biography:

Ken Rhie is the CEO of Trumpia, which earned a reputation as the most complete SMS solution including user-friendly user interface and API for mobile engagement, Smart Targeting, advanced automation, enterprise, and cross-channel features for both mass texting and landline texting use cases. Mr. Rhie holds an MBA degree from Harvard Business School. He has over 30 years of experience in the software, internet, and mobile communications industries.