From “painful” to “smooth”: How Unum delivered a low-stress open enrollment

ReBecca Combs, Benefits Manager at Southern Finishing, described the previous year’s enrollment as “very painful.” Issues included late delivery of enrollment materials, difficulty accessing reports and miscommunications with the external enrollment team. This led to employee confusion and, ultimately, low participation. “We had an outside agency send in enrollers, and I feel there was a lot of miscommunication,” ReBecca explained. “There wasn’t a lot of familiarity with what we did. We didn’t get our booklets in time. People didn’t have the information they needed to enroll. It was just really unorganized.”

Despite economic challenges, Unum helped Southern Finishing maintain coverage while improving benefit accessibility for employees. This included printed materials and QR codes posted in break rooms, a full benefits book available online and support for employees without computer access.

“[Our employees] don’t have access to computers at their workstations, and they don’t always have computer access in the offices at the facilities,” shared ReBecca. “So unless they were to call in, they wouldn’t be able to talk to somebody. We did schedule the employee enrollers to go to the facilities, and each facility had people there for several hours. If they had more than one shift, they would come in the morning and in the afternoon. Anyone that had questions was sure to meet with somebody.”

The significant time savings, overall efficiency and ongoing support turned a “painful” enrollment process into a “smooth” experience for Southern Finishing. This vast improvement over the previous year resulted in strong employee participation and satisfaction, as well as reliable documentation and data accuracy to make HR easier.

“I would definitely stay with Unum,” ReBecca reported. “For the people that are doing the open enrollment and the enrollers that they sent, and everything they did to help us, I would say that we are not looking to change that for the next open enrollment.”

• Streamlined implementation: Quickly set up and enroll cases with minimal administrative effort for both your team and clients. Dedicated onboarding teams, standardized eligibility and plan provisions and Partner Relationship Directors ensure smooth platform consultations and alignment between Unum and Employee Navigator systems.
• Seamless data exchange: Employee Navigator serves as the system of record for benefits data, ensuring accurate member-level deductions and invoice integrity through automated or guided plan setup. Weekly data connections process same-day, and open, current and prior elections can be submitted simultaneously without delays.
• Plan setup solutions: Our proprietary application programming interface (API) automates plan builds to match quotes exactly, including all rates and provisions, reducing invoice reconciliation and claims issues. If API integration isn’t feasible, the Plan Build Guide offers a step-by-step walkthrough of Employee Navigator for accurate and efficient manual setup.
• Embedded evidence of insurability: Accelerate the EOI process from weeks to minutes with real-time decisions and no paper forms. Employees complete applications via single sign-on (SSO) and receive instant decisions within Employee Navigator, and payroll deductions flow automatically when integrated — supporting all enrollment types.