Benefit managers have utilized AI to help with everything from automating tasks, simplifying recruiting processes and streamlining benefits enrollment. A new benefit agent from Flimp is promising to help leaders answer some complex benefits questions, too.
A quarter of employees are still confused about the details of their benefit packages, according to a recent survey from financial services company Voya Financial. Employees typically have access to this information, yet struggle to know where to find it. That's where AI can help guide employees to the right answers and bridge that knowledge gap.
"AI is really impacting everything, especially in assisting people with various tasks that were previously very time consuming," says Wayne Wall, CEO of Flimp. "The benefits space in particular was really in need of synthesizing all of the information that people need to know about but often don't."
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Flimp's AI chat bot enables organizations to embed their company's website and benefit guides, including PDFs, internal policies and other company documents. Based on this information, the bot can answer any questions related to benefit offerings, health plans, policies and other important information. The chatbot also comes with a core set of baseline benefit information applicable to most organizations like common terms and definitions.
For example, an employee can ask the chatbot to outline each health plan available to them through their benefits and the AI will list them, as well as include the most important and relevant information such as co-pays, deductibles, the type of plan and the total cost. Employees can also ask specific questions about coverage based on personal needs, such as pregnancy or disability policies and information.
"It's cumbersome to have to hunt through a 50 or 60 page guide," Wall says. "One of the primary focuses of this product is to help employees access their benefits information more readily so they can be well educated and better informed."
In order to keep the chatbot from accidentally providing misinformation or introducing bias, all of Flimp's models are closed circuit, meaning the chatbots can't answer questions outside of the information provided by benefit managers. The AI should only answer the most repetitive questions benefit leaders are being asked daily that can sometimes keep them from focusing on more important facets of the job.
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"When a benefits person is supporting hundreds of employees, and everybody wants an answer right away and they've already got so many tasks to undertake — it's overwhelming," Wall says. "Having a reliable tool that can answer employees' questions about their medical plans or voluntary benefits really just takes the burden off of them and frees up a lot of their time."
Once an organization partners with Flimp, that chatbot is available to employees through a link provided to them in their benefit portal that takes them directly to the AI. The chatbot is entirely customizable from its name and avatar to its communication style with employees. Every feature was designed to make the chatbot easy to engage with and attractive to users.
"As long as there's a strong top-down AI policy keeping people safe, employers should be open to this kind of innovation," Wall says. "These tools really help employees focus on what matters to them and motivates them to self-educate around their benefits, which is important."
