The Benefits Engagement Survey Tool

The Validation Institute’s Benefits Engagement Survey Tool (BEST) has just obsoleted every other way of measuring engagement across your vendors. If you disagree, just claim the million-dollar reward. (Good luck with that.)

As a starting point, BEST draws a bright line between participation and engagement. While many folks use the words “Engagement” and “Participation” interchangeably, the bright-line distinction between the two is described in this two-minute video.

You may have noticed that vendors always claim to have high engagement, and their “satisfaction” scores are always 4.5 or higher. This is for two reasons:

1. Conflating satisfaction with incentives or waived copays with satisfaction of the program itself. For example, Livongo gets a lot of usage because the supplies are free, but their Amazon review average was a 1.5 and the Better Business Bureau gives them a 1.6. This review says: “The only reason I’m using Livongo is the strips are free.”
2. Not measuring the people who dropped out due to dissatisfaction or lack of interest.

BEST consists of a simple three-question survey for each of 5 or 6 (or more, but you would have to start offering completion incentives due to the survey length) different programs and/or point solutions.  Here is what the survey looks like to the user:

These questions are asked of all 5 or 6 programs. For the time being, you send us the name – and also a one-line sentence describing each program, in case employees don’t recognize the same. In this example, we used Headspace as an example.

You’ll send us 5-6 of these names/sentences and we populate the survey.  We will then send you the link to the survey. You can send the survey to everyone, or to a subset of people.

The elegance of this system is that the same people are rating all the programs, force-ranking them in a way.

Once engagement is force-ranked, you will also need to know the cost of the program, to force-rank the cost-effectiveness of the engagement achieved. Ideally, that would be the total cost, including incentives and subsidies (for strips, meds etc.).

We then graph the results. The score on the vertical axis is calculated by multiplying the number of uses (the first question) by the usefulness rating in the second question. That provides the Engagement Score.

The horizontal axis is the program cost. You look for programs in the upper left quadrant. Those programs achieved high engagement cost-effectively. You would want to ditch programs in the lower right quadrant for the same reason.

There is an exception to that conclusion…and that’s what the third question is all about.

The third question is used to determine the color of the bubble. Some benefits are barely used (like fertility) but are appreciated. The color of the bubble captures that.

This video shows how the measurement gets done.

Pricing