Buying a benefits platform is the easy part. Getting it live, well used and truly valued by your people is where most of the work happens – and where most of the risk sits.
That's what we covered in our webinar, How to implement an employee benefit platform that works, featuring insights from managing director - benefits, Phil Curtis, and members of the Ciphr benefits implementation team. Between them, they've implemented flexible benefits platforms for organisations from 50 to almost 12,000 employees, so the conversation stayed firmly on what really happens during a build, not just the theory. Here are the key takeaways.
Six reasons why organisations start looking for a new benefits platform
There's rarely one single trigger. The reasons that come up most often when talking to prospective clients are:
-
The benefits package isn’t good enough. You want to attract, engage and retain your team, and what's currently on offer isn't enough to do that
-
One-size-fits all benefits. Everyone gets the same thing, with no flexibility to choose what suits them or their current needs
-
Poor communication. The benefits exist, but ask a handful of employees what they get and they won't know
-
Desire for salary sacrifice. Pensions, cycle to work, cars and more – flexible benefits platforms are built to roll these out well
-
Admin overload. Spreadsheets, manual conversions, and payroll picking up the pieces every month
-
Competitive pressure. Your competitors are offering a more comprehensive, more tailored benefits package than you are, and it's starting to cause problems
Whichever of these applies, the fix isn't just buying a platform. It's how you implement it.
Get your stakeholders on board before you start implementing an employee benefits platform
As with any project, implementation only goes smoothly if the right people are on board from day one:
-
Staff - find out what benefits they actually want, through a survey or another route. Early involvement creates greater engagement when you come to launch the platform
-
Senior management - they need to believe in what you're doing and be visibly behind it
-
Finance - some benefits have cash flow implications. Cycle to work schemes, for example, means the company pays for bikes upfront, so finance needs to know that's coming
-
Payroll - they'll be picking up the pieces of everything you introduce, from new payroll categories to whether deductions are net or gross. The reports you send to payroll are critical, so get them involved early, not at the end
Implementing an employee benefits platform, step by step
1. Build a project plan with clear milestones
A good implementation team works from a structured project plan. They divide tasks into items for you, the client, and for them to own. The timeline is usually broken into digestible phases – discovery, build and validation – with a launch date set up front and everything else worked backwards from there. Regular project meetings throughout mean nobody's surprised by what's expected of them, and there's room to talk clients through it if a deadline starts to feel tight.
2. Get the branding right
Employees are more likely to trust and use a platform that looks and feels like it belongs to their employer, not a generic third-party tool. A good employee benefits platform, like Ciphr benefits, makes the employee benefits experience feel like your own. That starts with a "look and feel" document covering brand colours, hex codes, logos and imagery, which the client completes, and the implementation team uses to build the system. Branding discussions should start early, because they often needs input from people outside the core project team – marketing or design specialists who aren't on the regular weekly calls – so factor in the extra time to consult them.
3. Build the benefits themselves
This is the engine room of the whole project: gathering the detail on every benefit you offer, provider rules, eligibility, rates, who's currently enrolled, and how it's presented to employees when they log in.
It's also where the complexity tends to hide. Providers often have their own rules that sit above whatever you have communicated internally – a life insurance benefit might let a new joiner increase cover to the maximum straight away, then restrict them to one step a year after that. Clients don't always know these rules exist, so a good implementation team will proactively check with the provider or broker rather than assume.
TUPE can make things more complex. Transferred employees may need to keep different benefits from other staff. The platform can manage this in the background, so each person sees the right benefits and reports stay clear.
Other things to plan for at this stage: different start dates or probation periods for benefit eligibility, whether senior leaders get earlier access to certain benefits, and when in the year rates renew.
4. Set up reporting
In most projects, you need two reports to keep everything moving smoothly:
-
Provider reports show who is covered and share the details the provider needs, such as age, location and dependants. Each provider usually has its own format, so build the report around their rules
-
Payroll reports cover the deductions themselves, often including element codes, and typically go out monthly, with changes from the previous month highlighted to make life easier for whoever's administering the system
Most of this can be automated. Reports generate automatically once a window closes (eg a new joiner or annual renewal window) and are delivered by SFTP or made available to log in and download, with an email notification either way. Reports are archived for up to 18 months, so there's always a way to check what happened if a query comes up later.
5. Plan your communications
Communications should be linked directly to the benefits themselves, not bolted on afterwards. That might mean a welcome email when someone joins, a message once they pass probation and a benefit becomes available, or an in-system notification prompting the HR team to review and approve a selection someone's made. On top of that, most platforms allow HR teams to send announcements or surveys directly to employees, encouraging them to log in and engage.
6. Add reward and recognition
Reward and recognition isn't a bolt-on system with a separate login – done well, it's fully integrated into your employee benefits platform, and it's a strong lever for engagement. Common elements include:
-
E-cards for birthdays, thank yous and welcomes, which can also feed into a public recognition board
-
Points-based praise, often with managers given an allocation of points to award, which employees can redeem through eVouchers or other reward types
-
Awards, typically peer-nominated and sometimes anonymous, such as employee of the month
-
Service milestones, recognising 5, 10 or 15 years' service based on start date
The budget conversation usually comes first, since that shapes which of these elements you are able to include.
7. Test, test, and test again
Testing isn't a single stage at the end – it happens throughout. Early on, that means reviewing the draft site to check it looks and works as intended. Closer to launch, you’ll test the user experience, that the data is correct, and that the system’s rules are properly configured – so employees see the right benefits package for them, based on their seniority, tenure, or location. To do this, you’ll be closely involved in testing the system throughout the implementation period – not just at sign-off.
Five things that make an employee benefits platform implementation go smoothly
Across hundreds of implementations, a few things consistently separate the projects that go well from the ones that don't:
-
Accurate data. Validation regularly uncovers things that weren't quite working the way the client thought. It’s always better to find that during implementation than after go-live
-
Clearly defined outcomes. If everyone agrees what you're trying to achieve, the project plan is far easier to build
-
Strong internal communication between you and the vendor’s implementation team. This is what keeps a project on track
-
Automated data transfers. Moving data from an HR system by API integration rather than manually, removes a whole category of risk
- Committed team players on both sides. The implementation team's side of that bargain is a track record of never missing a deadline. Your side matters just as much
What success looks like after go-live
Go-live isn't the finish line. Building engagement before launch matters just as much as the build itself: webinars to explain the platform, a clear look at whether the benefits on offer cover what people actually need, and a staggered rollout so nobody's overwhelmed on day one.
After go-live, the focus shifts to account management: tracking engagement levels, looking at benefit utilisation through the platform's built-in analytics, watching wider benefit trends, and using all of that to identify gaps. New benefits tend to get phased in through the year rather than added all at once to avoid overwhelming the platform or the people using it.
Common employee benefits platform implementation questions
-
What's the most common mistake when switching to a flexible benefits platform for the first time?
Two things come up repeatedly. First, data quality: it's common to find the previous provider held information that wasn't quite right, and a thorough implementation process usually catches it. Second, timing: running the old and new systems in parallel while building the new one takes longer than people expect, so plan for that overlap rather than assuming a clean handover.
-
Engagement has dropped since we launched our scheme. How do we re-energise it?
Start by surveying your people. Do the benefits on offer still match what they want and need? A gap analysis can help here too - map what you currently provide against what your workforce actually values, and you'll often find the two have drifted apart without anyone noticing.. From there, a phased relaunch of updates, alongside consistent promotion, tends to work better than one big push. A platform doesn't run itself any more than a website does – it still needs ongoing communication to stay visible.
-
Is there such a thing as too much choice?
Yes. Loading too many benefits and too much information onto a platform at once means people miss things or get overwhelmed. Grouping benefits into clear categories – health and wellbeing, money matters, home and lifestyle, for example – helps keep things manageable and stops the list from feeling endless.
Watch the full webinar
Ready to talk implementation?
If you're weighing up a new benefits platform, or wondering whether your current one is set up to work as hard as it should, get in touch with the Ciphr benefits team. Request a demo or find out more about Ciphr benefits.