Benefits Administrator Jobs-to-be-Done Study

The Workplace Digital Experience domain had a large number of major initiatives over the next several years and wanted to ensure that our solutions meet the needs of our clients.

The UXR org had never untaken a JTBD study in this domain due to competing priorities but felt it was the right moment to invest the time and effort into deeply understanding plan sponsor needs in order to guide our future roadmap and ensure we were focusing on the right things.

Year

Stakeholders

2024

Employer Digital Experience

Client Reporting & Analytics

My Role

Due to the tight timeline and turnaround for this project (~2 months), I worked in collaboration with 2 other UX Researchers to complete this project. My role was focused around analysis and synthesis of the qualitative data outputs to derive the needs statements.

We worked with an external vendor to execute the quantitative survey portion of the study.

Research Objective

The goal of this research was to identify and prioritize daily benefits administrator needs. To do this, we conducted ~30 in-depth interviews with current and prospective benefits plan administrators

Research Questions

  • What process do people follow throughout their end-to-end journey of administering benefits plans? What steps do people follow throughout this entire process?

  • What are the factors that influence the end-to-end process and how do they impact the job steps?

  • What are different pieces of information people need in each step of their process?

  • What are the common pain points people experience in managing their company’s benefits plans?

  • Do the proposed Job Steps resonate with people? Why or why not?

  • What needs to people have within each Job Step?

Participant Recruitment & Methodology

Who We Talked To

  • N=20 benefits plan administrators recruited through our internal panel

  • Mix of market segments, products, and industries

What We Did

  • 1:1 hour long in-depth interviews over Zoom

  • Use of Miro to aid in facilitation

  • The first ~half of interviews focused on defining the job steps and less about the needs

  • The second half of interviews was less about extracting the steps but rather to validate and deep diver into individual steps (derived from the first set of interviews) and identifying underlying needs within each step

Process

My UX research colleague conducted the in-depth interviews and my involvement was primarily in the analysis and synthesis of the 20 interviews/ transcripts. I created a tagging strategy in Dovetail to organize verbatims by needs as well as the associated Job Step.

I then exported all the needs statements in Dovetail over to Miro and created stickies for each need statement.

My team and I split up Job Steps to do a first pass through the stickies to de-duplicate and affinitize stickies into categories. We then each reviewed one another’s work to continuously refine the ~500 needs statements derived from the interviews.

We kept doing this until we arrived at a final set of 108 distinct & unique needs across 8 categories (job steps). We then sent over the needs statements to our external vendor, who programmed and administered the quant survey (N~300 users recruited from our internal panel of benefits admins).

Needs were weighted on importance and dissatisfaction ratings to calculate an overall opportunity score (e.g. high importance + low satisfaction on the need currently being met = high opportunity score).

Key Findings

  • Benefits plan administrators have eight categories of activities (job steps) they do throughout the year: Auditing & Compliance, Contributions & Funding, Daily Participant Management, Data Accuracy, Distribution, Enrollment & Events, Plan Review, and Reporting & Data Management

    • The Contributions & Funding category had the highest importance rating with a high dissatisfaction rating, presenting the greatest area of opportunity

  • Key factors include (but are not limited to) meeting their employees’ needs, legal and regulatory changes, cost of benefits vs. value, vendor tools & partnerships

  • Common pain points include (but are not limited to): auditing & compliance tasks are time-consuming and tedious, inaccurate data, and answering employee/executive questions

  • We identified ~108 needs across the eight job steps of “administering benefits plans for my company within the year”

Outcomes

  • The results of the Jobs research was shared with key stakeholders, who used the prioritized set of needs to inform their roadmaps and move or de-prioritize items to the backlog to ensure they were focused on high- value experiences that presented the greatest opportunity for Fidelity

  • This set of needs were added to the User Needs Database that was being created by the Quant UXR Team, which would enable and empower stakeholders to self-serve (and not have to reach out to a researcher to understand what are the top needs of benefits admins)

  • Because core functional jobs remain stable over time, Jobs studies only need to be refreshed every ~5 years or so. The activities and underlying needs identified in this Jobs study will serve business partners for years to come