News travels fast in our industry, so when we announced Employee Navigator’s acquisition of Ease questions flooded in regarding our plans for both companies. To alleviate concerns we decided to pull the curtain back, first by hosting periodic webinar updates, then by inviting brokers to our office to discuss their thoughts in person. We learned a lot and took the feedback to heart.
During those in-person meetings I heard some great comments, but brokers also expressed some genuine concerns they had when comparing Ease and Employee Navigator. In an effort to be transparent I thought it would be helpful to share some of the positive and negative commentary brokers shared with us during our first round of Employee Navigator training:
Let’s start with some of their concerns:
“How do we get visibility into the mass amount of carrier data errors that are in the Ease system?”
“I was impressed with the tenure of many of the Employee Navigator employees that I met in Maryland. Their loyalty to you and to the Employee Navigator speaks volumes about the company you’ve built and the workplace that it is. I do wonder, though, if the tenure and longevity of your staff has led to a myopic view of your product.”
“As I’ve worked in Employee Navigator since obtaining my access, I’m finding that the system isn’t as intuitive as Ease, and I hope that is something that is being addressed in development.”
“I cannot imagine that I will have time over the next year to fully transition all of our 200 or so clients into a fully functioning platform, with connections and have time to train each HR person.”
Now for the good:
“After spending this time going through the system, I can see that there is going to be a bit more work, but Employee Navigator is clearly the superior platform.”
“I can see how The Wall is going to be so much more helpful than Ease’s “To-Do” list for those groups I have to manually manage.”
“The reporting features are so much nicer than Ease, I love the ability to look at prior enrollment data in one report.”
“The way you are allowing the rules to be used in different ways within in plan build is going to make my life easier, I have a group in Ease where I’ve had to build 4 different plans where in EN I can build 1 plan with 4 different rules to determine benefit.”
“The “all connected” vision has long been my desire for Ease, but I did not realize the lack of data integrity which made much of this difficult if not impossible. Ease was certainly hiding things and blaming everyone else for their connection issues while never addressing the issue of data integrity.”
“There was one thing that really stuck with me that you said. The idea of making the client’s life easier…not the brokers.”
In talking with brokers and our partners, I hear time and again that they are focused on delivering the best products and services to their customers. We share this goal. Benefit administration and integrations at scale is hard, and while we will make mistakes along the way, we’ll fix them as soon as we can. Some people think we haven’t moved fast enough, but our goal is to provide stability for our brokers, partners, and their customers which requires a lot of listening and careful planning. Each day our team will work to earn your trust as we build the largest and most scalable agnostic benefits marketplace in the country.
George Reese, CEO
