Cape Air, HUB International, and Symetra Life:
Teaming Up to Build a Better Benefits Experience
Teamwork Makes The Dream Work
The Turbulence
The HR team at Cape Air felt that their employees didn't understand their benefits, leading to confusion during enrollment and employees enrolling in plans that might not be the best fit for their unique health and financial background. Historically, the team at Cape Air was enrolling employees on paper, making open enrollment a time consuming, tedious process. On top of that, they felt that they weren’t successfully communicating with their employees about benefits, and they weren’t properly demonstrating the value of the different benefits plans available.
"The team at Cape Air didn't feel as though employees had a good grasp of the benefits being offered, and during open enrollment specifically, they felt as though their communication strategies weren’t effective,” said Ian Skinner, Senior Vice President at HUB International
This lack of understanding meant that enrollment rates across plans were lower than they hoped, which meant that plans, like their voluntary plans and unique plans like Symetra’s Pilot Disability Plan, were unnoticed and undervalued. Cape Air wanted to solve for benefits confidence and satisfaction.
The Solution
Ian Skinner, Senior Vice President, HUB International
HUB International: HUB International, ranked 5th among the world's largest insurance brokers, has over 15,000 employees and 530 offices across North America. An all-star team of Benefits Brokers from HUB International partnered with Cape Air to help them develop a benefits strategy that both supports their employees and evolves to meet their changing needs.
Cape Air, HUB, and Symetra teamed up to tackle these challenges head on. To alleviate the pain points surrounding a manual on-paper enrollment, HUB introduced a digital, online enrollment to the Cape Air team. This helped them streamline their open enrollment processes, saving the Cape Air team all of the time it was taking them to manually enroll each employee. To tackle the issue of communication and benefits education, Symetra turned to Nayya. After having partnered with Nayya on many similar cases in the past, the team at Symetra knew that benefits decision support through Nayya would help Cape Air overcome the benefits engagement and satisfaction obstacles that they were facing, and when they brought the idea to Cape Air and HUB, it was a no brainer. Why?
“Folks were making benefits decisions without all of the information they needed. We were looking to address those issues and we felt like Nayya would be a really effective way to engage the employees, educate them about benefits, and help them make informed, confident decisions," said Ian Skinner, Senior Vice President at HUB International. Moreover, the implementation process exceeded their expectations — it was seamless and straightforward. "The implementation process was excellent! The Nayya team made us feel supported throughout the process, and they were all very responsive,” reported Beth Kennelly, Director of Benefits at Cape Air.
+14%
Accident
Insurance
+58%
Core Short
Term Disability
+35%
Voluntary Long Term Disability
+36%
Critical Illness
Plans
Cape Air: Cape Air was born out of a passion for aviation. The airline, founded in 1988, operates scheduled flights across Cape Cod and the Islands, New England, Eastern Montana, the Midwest, and the Caribbean. Cape Air cares deeply about everyone who interacts with their business, and are driven by a desire to create a best in class experience for their employees and customers.
Symetra Life Insurance Company: Symetra Life Insurance Company is an insurance company that provides retirement plans, employee benefits, annuities and life insurance worldwide. Cape Air was offering benefits plans through Symetra, and the team at Symetra was able to offer guidance to Cape Air on how to best reach their benefits goals.
Benefits are hard. For Cape Air, it was really important for HUB International, their broker, Symetra Life, their carrier, and Nayya to come together to help build a better benefits experience for their employees. Before we dive into just how these teams improved benefits engagement and drove ROI for the Cape Air, let’s meet the teams:
"The team at Cape Air didn't feel as though employees had a good grasp of the benefits being offered, and during open enrollment specifically, they felt as though their communication strategies weren’t effective.”
Prepare for Takeoff...
The formula is simple: the better employees understand their benefits, the more confident they are to enroll in the right plans, and the more likely they are to enroll in additional products. Cape Air saw increased enrollment across a variety of plans including voluntary and ancillary programs.
"Their enrollment increased across the board in all of the products, but most notably the voluntary benefits. We quadrupled their enrollment levels in their voluntary benefits package," said Skinner.
After using Nayya for open enrollment, Cape Air experienced the following:
+122%
Buy-up Short Term Disability
+120%
Employee Supplemental Life
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"Nayya helped us drive enrollment rates across these plans, especially across our Pilot population."
Beth Kennelly,
Director of Benefits at Cape Air
Nayya's personalized decision support and benefits education enabled Cape Air to communicate not only the plans they were offering but express the value of each plan at an individual level.
"Implementing Nayya significantly reduced the amount of questions and confusion surrounding enrollment and the choices that employees had to make," said Skinner.
Ian Skinner
Senior Vice President,
HUB International
"Implementing Nayya significantly reduced the amount of questions and confusion surrounding enrollment and the choices that employees had to make."
Ian Skinner
Senior Vice President,
HUB International
"We felt like Nayya would be a really effective way to engage the employees, educate them about benefits, and help them make informed, confident decisions."
Beth Kennelly
Director of Benefits,
Cape Air
"The implementation process was excellent! The Nayya team made us feel supported throughout the process, and they were all very responsive.”
Cape Air learned that personalized decision support led to employees migrating from their existing plans to ones that better fit their physical, mental, and financial needs and goals. After learning about their options and understanding the value of different plans through Nayya, 10% of employees migrated to a different plan than what they were enrolled in in past years, which enabled Cape Air to deliver on plan optimization goals.
Cape Air also witnessed an increase in employee contributions to their FSAs. Contributions to pre-tax savings accounts like FSAs not only lead to cost-savings for employees, but also result in payroll tax savings for employers.
We've found that 3 key ways to drive ROI through benefits are by increasing overall benefits engagement, delivering on plan optimization, and increasing contributions to pre-tax programs like FSA accounts — Cape Air, HUB, and Symetra were able to check each of these 3 boxes.
Beth Kennelly, Director of Benefits at Cape Air
“We saw an uptick in contributions to the FSA program. We attribute that to the education that Nayya provided employees.”
In summary, the collaboration between Cape Air, HUB, Symetra, and Nayya resulted in increased enrollment rates across a range of benefits plans. By strengthening their benefits communication and education, the team was able to convey the value of different plans and give employees confidence to enroll in the right plans and programs. All in all, these 3 teams worked together to create an incredible benefits experience, leading to happier, healthier, more confident employees.
A Smooth Landing
Ian Skinner, Senior Vice President, HUB International
“One of our goals was to help Cape Air create a better employee experience. We asked them, if they were sitting in the employees’ shoes, how would they want that experience to be? When it comes to benefits education, more is better — Cape Air embraced that. When you have an employer that really cares about their employees, and you have a broker that's aligned with that, then you have a result like this.”
Case study
Destination: ROI
