Who is Alliant?
Alliant is the 5th largest insurance brokerage in the United States. With over 14,000 employees, and 100+ offices across the USA serving the full range of their clients' risk management, insurance brokerage, and employee benefits consulting needs. Their Midwest team uses Foleon to modernize how they deliver benefits communications, making it faster, more engaging, and easier for clients and employees to access critical information.
Intro
If you work in insurance, the words “open enrollment” probably send shivers down your spine. And if you don't, here's a little intel: open enrollment is a period — typically once a year — when employees can review, select, or change their benefits provided by their employer. For insurance companies, it means one thing: all the benefits guides need to be ready on time, for all clients. For a company like Alliant, with a book of business of over $47 billion, the stakes are huge.
We chatted with Christina Christensen, Account Manager Lead and Midwest Communications Specialist at Alliant, and she told us about her team's previous content creation process and the bottlenecks that came with it.
- Content production wasn't ideal: Printed guides required long production times, complex coordination, including back and forth with external vendors.
- Version control became a nightmare: Edits were impossible to implement once materials were sent, guides needed to be re-printed.
- Their resources were limited: Account managers like Christina were juggling both content creation and client management.
- Costs were high: Physical printing and mailing could cost nearly $4,000 per client, depending on the client's size.
Knowing that open enrollment would always be around the corner, the team wanted to make a change. So they went on the lookout for a new way of working.
So far to date Alliant has achieved:
“With Foleon I'm able to get an entire benefits guide done in one to two days where a physical benefits guide is about 25 pages and that's clearly taking me over a week.”
Christina Christensen, Midwest Communications Specialist at Alliant
Old ways of working die hard
Printed files are to content marketing what landlines are to communications. Old.
But changing ways of working is hard in a powerhouse such as Alliant.
“We used to put together physical employee benefit guides for our clients. I think it's just like a safety blanket for employees, because it's always been that way, for years.”
The issue when you print content, is that if there's a mistake, there's no way to fix it. No way to update any new information. You'd have to print the content over and over again. And with employee benefits guides, information changes throughout the year, and guides quickly becomes outdated.
“If there’s a mistake, then we have to deal with the mailing service, there can be delays. Then employees don't get their guides in time to make the decisions for open enrollment.”
Complex processes & limited resources
Juggling tight deadlines, high-stakes client needs, and tools that couldn’t keep up made things harder. Factor in the human side of things and you've got yourself a perfect combo for chaos.
“We are all human, so it is really just one or two people working on these benefit guides that take a long time, and we're not able to just whip something out in a day's time. It takes a few days. It takes a lot of back and forth.”
Creating content in a tool like PowerPoint is time-consuming, time that they couldn't allocate to something else. And in a smaller team, everyone has multiple responsibilities.
“There's just so many other things that come into play. So many fires that can be more urgent than a benefits guide.”
With limited time and resources, they also couldn't create beautiful content. The focus was on getting the guides out the door as quick as possible. Which seemed like a missed opportunity.
“The design isn't great. We want do more, but it’s in PowerPoint, so we're limited.”
Employee benefits guide quickly became a dreaded task.
“Whenever anyone requests a printed guide, I just wanna hide under my bed covers.”
Time to embrace the new
Christina and her team needed a scalable, digital-first communication solution that could serve multiple client types, reduce production time, and support real-time updates.
“Initially, I think we just wanted something that was more of a one-stop shop for our clients... Something that was easy for us internally.”
Not staying behind
They realized that most of their competitors were moving toward digital, and didn't want to stay behind.
“I also looked at our competitors and saw that a lot of companies were going digital. And I thought if we can do the same thing and put our guides online where they're accessible 24/7. It's would only be a link that employees could access; they'd never lose it.”
A new era for employee benefits guides
Christina pushed to pilot Foleon in the Midwest as a central solution for digital benefits communication. She's logged over 244 hours in Foleon in just a year, building customized, interactive benefits guides that are transforming how Alliant communicates with clients and their employees.
Discover an employee benefits guide created by Alliant in Foleon.
Real-time editing vs. version control chaos
After moving their guides to Foleon, the team was able to make real-time edits, even after they'd been sent out.
“We're able to make edits and changes in real time, get that out immediately, and the changes are so easy to make and we don't have to worry about emailing it out to an entire team and then printing it off to everyone again and sending it to their homes.”
Information is always up to date and clients can use the same link all year long to get to their guides.
“That is the biggest difference... they're only reference is that one site. They're not confused on different versions.”
Elimination of printing and mailing delays and costs
By going digital, they didn't rely on external parties to print and ship the guides. Which resulted in huge time savings. On employees’ side, it also made things easier than having to wait for the guide to arrive in their mailbox.
“I think it's so much easier than waiting for the mail to come and waiting for that guide to come in the mail that may have gotten lost or went to the wrong address.”
Eliminating third-parties, allowed them to same huge amounts of money.
“Of course, we're saving money on printing and shipping. A lot of our clients sent guides to employees' individual homes, so you can only imagine what that costs for a larger employer.”
Time savings and production efficiency
Before using Foleon, it would take Christina more than a week to put a guide together. With the platform's templates and intuitive editor, it now takes her less than two days.
“With Foleon I'm able to get an entire benefits guide done in one to two days where a physical benefits guide is about 25 pages and that's clearly taking me over a week.”
Better engagement and employee decision-making
Gaining so much time, Alliant can now create beautiful looking guides that are easier to browse through.
“People were just kind of attracted, more so than they've ever been because we made it seem so attractive. We put all the facts out there.”
Information is always accessible for employees to look at, day-in, day-out.
“Employees and their family members could read the website at any time. So they're able to read up on it. We put fun educational videos in there... I think that really helped the employees make that informed decision.”
The bottom line
Alliant adopted Foleon in the Midwest region to create benefit guides that are easy to update, mobile-friendly, and data-rich.
“It has truly set the bar for us and other brokers out there. We're definitely moving in the right direction and thank God for you guys because, or else our clients could definitely be going somewhere that has an option like this, a hundred percent.”
It helped modernize a core business process that hadn't changed for over 20 years. Christina’s success in the Midwest now serves as a blueprint for expanding Foleon usage company-wide.
Things have improved on both the client’s side and Alliant's.
“Everything has been so great and that's what keeps us using Foleon, is that we're seeing the engagement, we're seeing employees educate themselves.”
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