Internal sessions with both EB teams to surface how they describe their own value and to identify possible positioning frameworks.
In-depth conversations with CIA’s Employee Benefits clients, exploring their experience, what they value, and how they describe the team to others.
Not conducted in this engagement. Client access constraints made a formal survey impractical at this stage. An option for future work.
Loyalty attaches to the people, not the firm the team is with. Several have already followed this team across firm changes and say plainly they’d do it again.
Asked to choose between expertise and service, most clients put service first and treat knowledge as what makes good service possible. Expertise is necessary table stakes; service is what clients actually experience as the value.
What clients describe valuing isn’t benefits expertise in the abstract. It’s work leaving their desk. Whether the team runs as an embedded partner or a behind-the-scenes resource, the underlying job is the same: take it off my plate.
Clients who brought the team in based on previous experience did so at new companies that didn’t know a broker should be doing more; they had no benchmark for what good looks like.
These frameworks reflect how the EB teams describe their own value, from inside the jar.
Neither is wrong. Customers experience things differently then the team. That difference is what the VOC process is designed to surface.
We will share framework candidates for discussion and validation at our next meeting, grounded in what clients actually said.