How to implement Zest’s benefits platform in your organization

So, you’ve chosen Zest as your employee benefits technology provider.

Congratulations! And secondly, welcome to our wonderful world of employee benefits.

The shareholders are on board, the important decisions have been made, and it’s time to get the ball rolling. But how do we kick things off?

Our experts have come together to walk you through the five key stages of implementation, and what you can expect at the start of your journey when partnering with the Technology of Benefits.

It’s important to remember that the days of technology proving hard to implement are long gone.

For an absolute age, it used to be an underlining issue of most benefit platform implementations, now, it’s more about understanding your own scheme rules.

Unlike most employee benefits platforms, Zest gives you the power to tailor the system to your requirements and helps build a future where employees are at the heart of every decision. Our primary strength is that we can understand your scheme rules quickly, with the ability to build them super-fast, as we DON’T rely on any coding.

There’s also no need for any form of handoff, as your consultant will be the person configuring your site, rather than having someone understanding your requirements and then passing it on to a different developer.

So, you already know how quickly we can implement your platform, but did you know through Zest you can also:

• Create and amend pages using our simple editing tool
• Personalise imagery, add video and make tweaks to your branded colours/fonts
• Manage different employer brands from one single system

We make the complex simple. You’ll be able to manage your employee benefits schemes quickly and easily. From Devon to Dundee, our system is updated in real-time, which means the benefits data is always accurate and up-to-date (but if you’ve already agreed to partner with Zest, you’ll already know that).

So, it’s bon voyage to manual processes. This time you build the rules.

Finding the perfect fit, fast!

Implementation is different for every company, and the time it takes to complete will depend on the complexity of your organisation and your team’s availability.

This isn’t something that should be rushed. If you can provide the required information and feedback during the implementation process swiftly, naturally that will speed up the process.

Like finding a needle in a haystack, if you need more time to collate everything, it will slow things down. While we have seen other benefits platforms take multiple months, even years to implement, Zest’s flexibility and experienced implementation team allow us to get you up and running within a matter of weeks.

Right, to the important part! Here is what the timeline (step-by-step guide) for implementation looks like according to our experts:

Step one – Requirements

With Zest you can automate which benefits are available to each employee based on factors like job grade, location, salary or a change in the employee’s circumstances.

But to start, you need to gather all of the information on your benefits. How they work, the eligibility groups within your company, and in particular, any exceptions to the rules.

You can break that down into two parts:

• The benefit scheme rules – How does the policy operate – which comes from the provider and their scheme documents
• As an employer, what are your rules – employee proposition rules for your different groups

You need to gather those two sets of requirements, that’s how we can start to put everything in place.

Step two – Configuration

Our consultants are the experts.

They will have understood your integration needs and will use Zest to configure everything. They will replay this to you each and every step of the away, simply to ensure accuracy. It’s not a coded system, but the ability to configure and tweak things as they go to show that result.

The areas this typically covers include:

• Branding
• Content & Content Pages
• The Rules (benefits and eligibility)

Step three – Training

Every day is a school day, and we break our training down into a few elements.

Firstly, we’ll train you on your overall branding so that you can align imagery and your tone of voice. This allows you free reign to take control, putting the power in your hands to make changes if and when they’re needed.

Secondly, when it comes to understanding the configuration, it’s all about the impact it can have. Our dedicated training team will help with all of those little intricacies around the rules of your offering. For example, which date the benefit is effective/available from? They have already been created, and it’s just which is the right match for your scenario.

There’s also administration. We’ll teach you all about the reporting side of things, where you can access everything in the platform, and where to schedule them to be in the right place, at the right time. After all, getting data in and out of Zest is key to your future platform engagement.

This is one of our main strengths. Zest offers a real self-service capability compared to our competitors. You have more automation. There’s no need to talk to us for your reporting, no need to wait around for someone to respond and no extra charges. Get everything you need at a few clicks of a button. To put it simply, we provide less administration, and free up time for you to focus on more important aspects.

And don’t worry, we’ll do everything in bite-size chunks with each relevant team, so we won’t overload you with everything in one session.

Step four – Validation and iteration

Now it’s time to make sure everything is right. Consider it a technological proofread perhaps.

Step four is the perfect opportunity for us to check that we’ve understood everything you’ve provided, and therefore all of the settings are correct. This is the perfect time to make any minor tweaks to aspects such as branding. It’s as simple as that.

Step five – Data

Ah data, arguably the biggest part of the project.

All of the rules hang off of being able to supply the data. If you have grades that need to be introduced, we need to be able to define those grades and the data needs to supply those grades in the correct format, so that the data interface works.

But don’t panic. It’s simply a process of data coming into Zest, with the data flowing out to benefit providers and payroll on our scheduled automated basis. We’ll cover all of this in stage three so you’re fully aware of the data ins and outs.

Your data will give us everything we need, and we’ll naturally test it first to make sure everything is perfect. The real advantage of Zest is that by saving data until the very end, the risks of the data falling out of sync are minimised. We can turn everything round in the space of a week.

Our consultants aren’t just doing technical implementation, they’re ensuring business success. So, from the outset, it’s about helping you to understanding the platform, finding out what you want to achieve, what does success look like and how do we build this platform to best drive that.

We make sure that we focus on your measures of success, aiming to achieve them from the start of your first annual enrolment window. And what extra measures can we use to help?

Firstly, you’ll be able to gain insights in order to make smarter decisions:

• Measure how your colleagues use the platform, understand the benefits their choosing, identify the ones they’re not and how it changes over a period of time
• Explore your data by drilling down into employee characteristics including age, department, gender and salary
• Create and view a dashboard for HR on benefit team tasks
• Quickly identify employees who have, haven’t or have considered making amends to their benefits.

We can also run campaigns and build eligibility groups for those that perhaps aren’t engaging with the platform. Want to make sure your annual enrolment launch follows the same success of your implementation? Our Zest Launch material is perfect for driving communications around your platform.

So, buckle up and enjoy the ride. Your platform implementation is a matter of weeks from being finalised.

Are you interested in implementing a new benefits platform? Keen to find out how we can Zestify your offering and take it to the next level? Book a demo today and partner with the Technology of Benefits.