What does it feel like to have your employee benefits expertly managed?

Whether or not managing your employee benefits in-house is possible depends very much on the platform you have. Small, simple benefits platforms don’t need a lot and can usually be run fairly effectively by HR staff. Those with larger staff numbers, people located in different countries, or those wanting a more comprehensive set of benefits might want to consider using an intermediary to manage their plan. A good broker can add a lot of extra value to your benefits platform and be more than a “middleman”, if you engage the right one.

This article from Pacific Prime Dubai highlights what you can expect from a comprehensive employee benefits and corporate health insurance broker in this part of the world.

Why would my company want to outsource employee benefits management?

There are a number of reasons as to why Dubai businesses choose to have their corporate health insurance plans managed by a broker. The biggest and most common reason is that an expert broker will help solve benefit’s related strategies effectively.

From our consultants, we know that the following challenges are commonplace in many companies that look after their benefits platforms in-house:

• Massive data requirements: When a company applies for a policy in Dubai, the insurer needs a data sheet of information that includes 22 different mandatory fields – for each of your employees. If you have only 10 employees, that’s not so difficult. Having more than 100 staff members means pulling together over 2,200 different bits of information each and every year.  
• High accuracy demands: If collecting all that information wasn’t enough, getting things like a visa or Emirates ID number wrong can mean your data is declined by the government, essentially holding back your employee benefits coverage. An office of 200 people means there’s 4,400 chances to get that data wrong.
• Big drain on HR resources: HR aren’t just about managing employee benefits and, if you don’t have a dedicated C&B team, having to spend excessive time not only managing employee census data but answering staff queries and assisting with claims can be a massive drain on resources.

These are frequent concerns we hear when we meet with new and prospective clients that are having issues with their current plan’s performance. For some, it’s a lack of resources within their company to effectively manage the benefits platform whilst still performing other tasks. Others find that their broker isn’t proactively working to ensure they’re adding value to their relationship.

What should my broker be doing to enhance my benefits management?

When it comes to making things easier for clients, we can only really explain the steps we take that ensure that our clients never feel rushed or abandoned when it comes to managing their benefits.

Have dedicated client and account management teams

In order to ease the workload of our clients, we provide our own client and account management teams that take over a lot of the work that your HR staff get saddled with. The best part is, our staff specialize in this work and do it day-in, day-out. If you have Pacific Prime Dubai’s client management support, your own staff can spend less time working out how to manage employee benefits, knowing that our industry experts are looking after it for you.

Monitor and regularly check the quality of your data

When you come on board, we work tirelessly to ensure that your staff census information is up to date and correct. It’s one of the most important parts of having an efficient corporate health insurance plan in Dubai. After your plan has been secured, our teams then work with you to ensure that the information is checked and updated frequently.

When you have a new hire, you will need to submit a lot of information to support their enrolment and Pacific Prime will guide you through the whole process. But not only that, we will also proactively help you to ensure your whole data sheet it up to date at all times, so whether it’s an expired Passport of Emirates ID we will work with you to obtain the details and record it.

The benefit of all this work during the year is making sure you use the time at renewal to actually consider your product options instead of re-producing admin heavy datasheets.

Offer value-added engagement, claims, and query support

In addition to ensuring the census data is maintained correctly, our teams at Pacific Prime Dubai go beyond to ensure that your plan is successful. This means offering orientation and information sessions, often including representatives from your employee benefits provider if desired. We also provide assistance for staff claims when required, and will always be available to answer questions about how the plan works.

Provide accounting support

The reconciliation and arrangements of all payments can also be a significant challenge for companies going it alone. Through us, we manage the payments for both customers and insurers alike – meaning no late bills or reimbursements. We do this as it also helps enhance our ability to keep and maintain accurate data and records.

How can this help my company?

If it’s not clear already, saving time and resources is a big reason why your company might partner with an employee benefits expert like Pacific Prime Dubai. We simplify insurance by taking over time consuming and niche tasks, and ensuring the things needed to run an effective and efficient employee benefits platform are handled in such a way that you’re not rushing last minute to prepare everything.

For our clients, they appreciate the advantages of having Pacific Prime as their benefits partner – which include:

• Reducing the risk of costly data errors
• Overseeing time consuming tasks that can often require in-depth industry knowledge
• Better data analysis and plan performance advice based on real-time information
• Greater engagement and satisfaction levels from staff
• A more focused approach to renewals and benchmarking due to the time saved maintaining data throughout the year

None of this is rocket science, but getting the whole service right takes experience and knowledge. At Pacific Prime Dubai, we’ve been serving MNCs, professional service firms, and SMEs for almost 20 years.

Get the best support for your corporate health insurance plan with Pacific Prime Dubai

We believe in our unique service model so much that we’ve actually been steadily expanding out client and account management teams to help maintain our ability to provide the excellent service our customers expect. The team in Dubai has almost doubled in the past 18 months and we have trained each person rigorously in how to administer policies, gather and record necessary information, and how to offer reliable value-added services.

We’re happy to show you how this model works and how it might benefit your business. If you’d like to arrange a meeting or just ask us some questions over the phone, contact the team at Pacific Prime Dubai today!