Unpacking the ROI of investing in an employee benefits platform

This summer, we’ve seen positive signs that cost of living pressures are easing, confirmed by the Bank of England lowering interest rates in the first cut since the pandemic in March 2020. This is a relief for many – not just individuals but businesses too.

However, the effects are still being felt in more ways than one. Commentators have claimed that it has made the UK a poorer, more anxious nation and our own data has shown that 29% of businesses have been unable to raise salaries in line with inflation in recent years.

Employers need to think more holistically about the role they can play in protecting employees and supporting them in ways that will truly make a difference to their lives – over and above their salary.

One clear way to overcome this is implementing a strong employee benefits package. Perks such as a generous pension or healthcare have become more important to six in ten (60%) employees when deciding where to work, and a good benefits package is now the most important thing nearly half (46%) of people look for in employment (rising to 57% of employees aged 18-34).

Not only can employee benefits aid recruitment efforts, they can save your business money – for example, Zest is currently saving its customers nearly £6.6million a month in National Insurance contributions through enabling pension contributions via salary sacrifice.

While getting benefits right is one thing, effective administration and accessibility is another – often if a business has a great benefits offering, there will be great technology behind it. Employee benefits platforms, like Zest for example, help businesses manage their employee benefits, offering a personalised benefits portal where employees can update their details and view and select their details, all in one place.

But how will a business know if it has the right benefits in place, and whether the technology behind them is not only allowing its employees to get the most out of what is on offer, but is also allowing you as a business to measure their effectiveness?

One way businesses can determine the ROI of a benefits platform is by considering four key pillars:

1. Price of the solution without compromising performance – is your business getting the best quality and cost-effective employee benefits platform?
2. Ability of the provider to drive efficiency and mitigate manual administration processes – is the platform speeding up and making your HR department’s work more accurate?
3. Employee engagement with benefits – are employees using your benefits and using them regularly?
4. Impact on recruitment and retention strategies – are people less likely to leave the business or more likely to join having heard the benefits on offer?

At Zest, we’ve used these four pillars to establish our position as an innovator in the employee benefits technology sector, and as a result, we’ve achieved a Net Promoter Score (NPS) of 82, which we’re proud to say sits at the top of our sector when it comes to customer satisfaction.

Pillar 1: Price

If we look at the first pillar – price – we’ve seeded efficiencies through every process involved in creating a platform for our clients. Our codeless platform ensures that the tech does the work so you don’t have to. We can build and maintain an employee benefits platform more cost-effectively than competitors with less risk by simply configuring our eligibility engine to handle the most complex of employee benefit scenarios.

Pillar 2: Efficiency

In terms of driving efficiency via automation, we’re helping employers to save time while removing the risk of human error that can result from sifting through data.

Removing all manual reporting and data import and export processes is probably the single most important feature in streamlining your workload, allowing you to free up resources to focus your energy on more strategic tasks.

Using AI-generated online help tools can also help to ensure your employees can find what they need in the application, rather than having to pick up the phone and call the HR team (although that’s not to say we’re not here to lend a helping hand if you need us, providing assistance from people, when you need it most).

Pillar 3: Engagement

When it comes to the third pillar, ensuring your chosen platform has high engagement rates among employees is key to ensuring value for money.

While engagement rates for most benefits platforms sit at around 50%, Zest’s partners typically see up to 90% engagement – a figure driven by the simplicity of our platform and our targeted communications, ensuring the right employee gets the right benefit at the right time.

Don’t just take it from us, discover how this works in practice by visiting our perfect partners page.

Pillar 4: Retention

Take the final pillar – retention. As much as we’d like this to be the case, it’s unlikely that employee benefits alone will keep someone at a job – however, it’ll certainly help.

With a large proportion of employees admitting that they’d be willing to walk away from their current job if another prospective employer offered them a better benefits package, communicating with employees to understand what they value, and personalising your offering to ensure individual needs are met is a sure way to let employees know you listen, value and genuinely care about them.

In today’s workplace, businesses can (literally) not afford to lose their grip on the talent they’ve come to rely on. To retain talent, and source fresh staff to build on the success of an existing team means effectively showcasing, tailoring and demonstrating the value of your employee benefits proposition to save money and supercharge your company’s growth.

While we’ll admit that we’re only ever so slightly bias, the importance of the right employee benefits platform can’t be overstated. When deciding which platform to use, considering ROI in a holistic way is essential to making the right.

Visit Zest ROI Calculator