Trinity's success story:
In 2023, the six-person Trinity University HR department decided it had had enough of time-consuming, manual benefit processes that frustrated employees and risked the accuracy of benefits data. The university committed to offering Unum benefits and learned the advantages of gaining access to Unum HR Connect for Workday®.
Founded in 1868, Trinity University is home to more than 2,500 students. Based in San Antonio, Texas, Trinity is rooted in the liberal arts and sciences while being guided by a set of values that places the student experience at its core.
Before HR Connect, enrolling in benefits at Trinity University was a manual process involving paperwork, data entry and onerous reconciliations. HR Connect automated this process, saving time and removing errors.
“Prior to 2023, all the benefit enrollments were done manually on paper,” explained Cindy Holmes, a benefits administrator at Trinity University. “The employee would fill out an enrollment form for each carrier. Then the information had to be entered on each carrier’s website and data had to be entered into the payroll system as well.”
“The HR Connect system gave me back some time. I no longer had to walk the employee through manual processes. Now the employee gets online in our new Workday system and can choose the benefit that they would like to enroll in without having the cumbersome process of re-typing their dependents, name, date of birth, and social security numbers for each carrier whose product they want to enroll in. It is very time saving, and now I can go on vacation for a little while.”
HR Connect’s ability to pull data directly from the university’s system has not only saved time but also enhanced accuracy in benefits administration, helping ensure that employees have the right coverage. “Unum has provided a better experience over the other carriers in different ways, one being the exceptional billing system that we don’t have to reconcile,” Holmes said. “We have over a thousand employees on the Workday system on the life insurance benefit and the time saved for reconciliation purposes is very valuable to us.”
“Before, we were spending hours reconciling carrier statements,” said Holmes. Now, “since the statement is generated directly from our system, there is no time spent on reconciliation. It is an automated process.”
Unum HR Connect has also made it considerably easier for employees to provide evidence of insurability (EOI) when requesting higher-than-standard levels of coverage.
“Prior to moving to the HR Connect system,” Holmes said, “our employees were mailed a written form for evidence of insurability and had to mail it back to Unum. Now it is a one or two click process. If the employee needs to complete evidence of insurability, an icon pops up on the screen, they click the icon, and complete the form.”
One of the significant benefits of HR Connect is the ease it provides to employees when they need to change their insurance coverage or beneficiaries.
“The best feedback we got from the employees is they were so tired of re-filling out forms every time they wanted to increase or decrease their life insurance amount,” said Holmes. “We now have a self-service system where they can immediately go in and change it and instantly see the amount of their premium. HR Connect does it all for them.”
Another benefit is that employees are now “much more knowledgeable about their benefits,” according to Holmes, and place a higher value on the benefit package Trinity offers them.
“The Unum integration team were experts,” according to Holmes. “The system has to be configured correctly to make sure that all the rules of coverage are followed. This team of experts worked diligently week by week to make sure that our system was set up correctly, that the billing would be set up correctly, that the EOI was set up correctly. The team knew exactly what they were doing and configured the system to work the way we wanted it to, to meet our needs.”
“We just went through our first open enrollment with the new system. It was perfect,” Holmes said. “The HR Connect system changed our processes. The first time our employees started using the system … they were not confused. They were not having to complete documents. It was a very streamlined enrollment, time saving and accurate.”
Holmes added, “I would never go back to the old way of onboarding or processing our benefits. HR Connect has taught us how much time we can save in not only the accuracy, but the reliability of the system.”
“Unum meets all of our needs", she said. “They set themselves apart from the other carriers. They have very high standards.”
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