Online user experience is key to maximising employee engagement with flexible benefits

Why creating an efficient, effective and satisfying online user experience is key to driving employee engagement with rewards & benefits

Reward, benefit & HR professionals are under more pressure than ever to demonstrate and deliver returns on their reward expenditure. Such returns are highly dependent on employees engaging with any reward or benefits programme.

If we consider employee benefits for example flexible benefits or employee savings platforms, the first challenge is encouraging employees to get online and have a look. The importance of intelligent and effective communications here is well documented and has been covered in previous white papers from Edenred.

However encouraging employees to go online is only half the challenge – once there it is important they engage and participate. That could mean taking time to make important flex decisions, or taking advantage of the many savings and offers purchased by their employer. In an online world, this is highly dependent on the usability of the online platform – how easy and intuitive is it to use, how engaging is it, how relevant is it to the individual. To what extent does the online platform present an effective, efficient and satisfying journey experience for the employee.

All too often we hear organisations express their disappointment with low levels of take up following a flex election period, or purchases through savings platforms.  We believe this has much to do with the communication process, but significantly with the quality of the online journeys presented to employees.

The digital world has changed and continues to change as customers – whether they are consumers or employees – become more and more discerning about the kind of experience they want to have when using your service. Those services that offer a poor user experience fail because this new breed of empowered audience can easily discover a competitor’s service through search and within seconds can abandon a journey on your site in favour for another.

For many years supermarkets have invested heavily in research and testing to identify the right way to lay out their stores in the right way to optimise the shopping experience and maximise sales. How should the store be laid out – where should products be positioned and in what sequence should shoppers find them; where should promotional offers be positioned etc. Store design and layout became a big industry in its own right.

Now as more and more choice exists in the online shopping space, a similar approach is being adopted by leading players to ensure their visitors have an enjoyable online experience that maximises engagement and online action. 

Successful online companies place their audience’s needs at the heart of their digital proposition instead of adding them in as a peripheral after thought once they’ve launched the service. This is what Edenred has sought to do with its new Flexible Benefits platform.

Edenred partnered with a leading online user journey consultancy to develop the platform. Extensive research and engagement took place during the project. The key part of this involved a number of employees from different organisations using various versions of the platform in a ‘user-lab’. During these tests, users would describe flex election journey as they tried to progress through it – they would challenge it where it didn’t make sense, ask questions and feed back all the way through. It was this feedback and engagement that effectively built the system.

We believe we have built an intuitive, easy to use flexible platform that puts users at its core and recognises the important decisions employees are asked to take during a benefits election period. For this reason, we are confident such a platform will increase participation and engagement with benefits and help organisations maximise return on their reward spend. And early experiences with our clients reinforce this view.