Case Study
Re-Thinking Annual Enrollment: Annual enrollment had become fragmented across systems and products, making it harder for people to understand their benefits and choose the right coverage.
Background:
We started by understanding how people actually moved through the enrollment moment. Interviews and journey mapping showed that enrollment was not simply transactional. It was a moment of uncertainty where people were weighing cost, family needs, and long-term financial protection all at once. Customer insight, digital product design, and enterprise systems were then brought together to simplify navigation, improve benefit understanding, and support more confident decisions. The work shifted the experience away from internal product logic and toward the questions and tradeoffs that mattered most to policyholders.
Approach:
A large financial services organization serves 29 million policyholders and customers, with millions of benefit decisions made each year through employer-sponsored annual enrollment. But the experience had been shaped around administrative efficiency and regulatory compliance rather than around how people actually make decisions. As products, systems, and enrollment pathways became more fragmented, policyholders were left to navigate complex choices under time pressure, often without enough clarity or confidence. The challenge was to redesign enrollment as a decision experience, not just a process.
Impact:
• Reframed annual enrollment from an administrative process into a critical decision experience
• Simplified benefit selection for millions of employer-sponsored enrollment decisions each year
• Created stronger alignment between customer needs, digital product design, and enterprise systems
• Established a scalable digital foundation for future services across protection, health, and financial well-being
