What Your Benefits Data Isn’t Telling You (Yet)

In the age of people-first HR and AI-powered personalization, having access to benefits data is one thing. Knowing what to look for in that data is another thing entirely. More important yet is having the right tools and insights to transform your data into action.

Most benefits leaders rely on standard dashboards to track enrollment, participation rates, and plan selection during open enrollment. But what happens after the open enrollment window closes? What blind spots are you overlooking that could unlock smarter engagement, more equitable experiences, and long-term cost savings for employees and your organization?

Here are areas of your benefits program that could be holding hidden data and what you can do to surface and activate those hidden (or at least, overlooked) insights.

1. Post-Open Enrollment Data: A Goldmine for Generating Year-round Program Refinements

Open enrollment is just the beginning. The real value lies in how employees use their benefits throughout the year, as well as how effectively your various programs and strategies adapt to changing needs across the year.

Instead of relying solely on enrollment data, high-performing HR teams are now analyzing:

• Platform engagement rates after open enrollment.
• Drop-off points as employees navigate through and interact with your benefits platform, portal, and apps.
• It’s essentially the user journey inside the digital benefits experience.
• Repeated service center questions that signal confusion.
• Which benefits are accessed — and which are ignored.

Empyrean’s platform captures this type of interaction data and transforms it into actionable insights. For example, if employees are frequently engaging with mental health benefits content but underutilizing EAP services, it’s a sign to either improve communication or reevaluate the offering entirely.

Empyrean clients like Peabody Energy have gained deeper visibility into what employees are searching for, clicking on, and engaging with through their benefits platform. With that insight, HR and benefit leaders can refine timing and messaging throughout the year.

2. Beyond Participation Rates: The Benefits Metrics That Really Matter

Participation rates are a start, but they rarely tell the whole story. To create impact, HR and benefits leaders should also track:

• Communication engagement
  You can adjust communication strategies if you know who’s opening open enrollment emails vs. who’s using the app or calling the service center.
• Cost per engaged employee
  By tracking usage among employees who are actively using and interacting with their benefits in meaningful, ongoing ways, you gain insights to help determine how efficiently your benefits dollars are being spent.
• Change in behavior post-communication
  The data can tell you, for example, if that email with the HSA explainer increased participation or contribution amounts.

Empyrean’s dashboards go beyond basic enrollment tallies. We help teams connect the dots between engagement and outcomes, whether it’s reduced turnover, improved well-being scores, or fewer inbound questions.

3. Digging Deeper for More Equitable Benefits Programs

When it comes to benefits, equity is about more than access. It’s about impact.

By segmenting usage data across age, location, job type, and more, benefits teams can identify systemic blind spots:

• Are hourly or field-based employees using digital benefits tools at the same rate as corporate employees?
• Are certain demographic groups underutilizing critical benefits like parental leave, mental health, or financial wellness support?
• Is your benefits communication reaching multilingual or neurodiverse populations effectively?

Empyrean helps HR teams close these gaps with intuitive dashboards and AI-powered insights that surface disparities early. Our clients can proactively adjust plan design, communication strategies, or even training resources based on what the data shows, not just what intuition suggests.

4. Continuously Track the Data That High-Performing Benefits Teams Track

The most successful teams aren’t just looking at benefits data once a year. They’re using it as a continuous feedback loop.

Here’s a year-round framework to consider:

Empyrean’s platform offers always-on insights into these metrics. We help HR teams course-correct in real time rather than being forced to wait on retrospective reporting.

Your Next Step: Ask Better Questions

The reality is that your benefits data has a lot to say, if you know how to listen. Most standard reporting dashboards aren’t built to illuminate what matters most to your people. Nor are they designed to support the kind of agile, employee-centered decisions today’s workforce demands.

At Empyrean, we believe benefits data should:

• Spark smarter communication that reaches employees when and where they need it.
• Reveal equity gaps and inform inclusive plan design.
• Support proactive interventions before engagement or well-being drops.
• Help HR shift from reactive problem-solving to strategic leadership.

Let’s turn your data into direction.

Explore how Empyrean’s personalized, AI-powered benefits experience platform helps HR teams move from insight to action — all year long.