Fluor Hot Line Offers 24-Hour Benefits Updates : Technology: A computerized-voice system answers employees’ questions about insurance, pensions or vacation time.
Here’s a new workplace wrinkle.
Fluor Corp. has added a hot line that allows employees to access personal benefit information--things such as vacation time and pension benefits accrued--24 hours a day.
While providing employees with greater access to data, the program is saving the company money too. Fluor says it expects to save $30,000 this year in its personnel department, which has been freed from answering a barrage of worker inquiries.
Fluor, the Irvine-based engineering and construction giant, installed a computerized system earlier this year that allows its 14,000 U.S. workers to call a toll-free number and obtain personalized information about their employee benefits from an automated voice.
“All they need is a touch-tone telephone,” said K. Sripathy , Fluor’s director of human resources. To keep the information confidential, he said, employees who call must use the telephone keyboard to punch in their Social Security and secret identification numbers.
Then they can ask a variety of questions: how their retirement fund investments are doing; how much paid time off they have accumulated; the amount of their various account balances; or what kind of coverages are provided by their health plans.
The automated system, known as the Benefits Information Line (BIL), never shuts down.
Sripathy said that while employees benefit from the convenience, the company is saving money by not having to pay personnel clerks to answer routine questions. He said while the entire voice system cost $40,000 to install, it should pay for itself in less than a year and a half.
“We are averaging 80 calls during weekdays and 35 to 40 calls on weekends,” Sripathy said.
Those employees who need more information, he added, still can talk to a personnel officer. Overall, he said he believes the number of personnel queries being made is greater than before the automated system was installed.
“Employees in the past were probably bashful of calling and asking the same question about their investments every month,” Sripathy said. “And in the past they would sometimes have to leave a message with a machine. You don’t have to play telephone tag with BIL.”
Fluor is in the vanguard of a national movement toward automating personnel benefits information, said to Bob Bhavnani, a principal and vice-president of Granada Systems Design in New York, the company that designed the computer software used in the BIL system.
The whole area of voice response is an extremely fast growing industry, expanding at the rate of 35% to 40% a year, he said.
While most interest to date has been shown by financial institutions that want to provide customers with current information about their savings and checking accounts, he said, over the last 18 months the concept also has begun to catch on with other companies.
“Anyone with more than 1,000 employees would benefit from the system,” he contends.
Neil A. Burger, a partner at Coopers & Lybrand, said that large business consulting firm sees “a huge potential market” for automated voice services in companies and has established a division in New Jersey to design and install customized systems. The division has about 30 clients, including American Standard Inc., Pitney Bowes and Nabisco Brands Inc.
A major attraction of voice systems, Burger said, is that they can help companies administer increasingly complex and personalized benefits that, for example, allow employees to choose among a wide array of medical plans and retirement investment options.
Customarily each year, employees fill out forms to switch their enrollment in medical plans or change their investment mix, after which a clerk must enter the data into computers. But Burger said with the automated voice system, employees can make the changes on the computers themselves by punching buttons on their phones.
“That gives you a paperless enrollment, and you reduce the possibility of error,” he said.
By the end of the year, Sripathy said, Fluor employees will be able to use the telephone to transfer their retirement money monthly from one investment form to another, such as from bonds to company stock. At the end of each month, they will get a receipt to confirm the transfer has been completed.
And by fall of next year, Sripathy added, the system will be augmented to allow Fluor employees to use the phone to select their life and health insurance plans.
“There is an unlimited capacity to this thing. Your imagination is the only limit,” he said.
