Empowering HRs to ensure employees have Day-0 coverage
About Plum
Plum helps companies provide and manage corporate health insurance for their employees. The platform is designed around two distinct experiences - a HR dashboard for managing policies, enrollments, and coverage, and an employee app for accessing benefits and claims.
Team
Digvijay (Product Manager) and Umang (Engineer)
Duration
2 months
Challenge
Corporate health insurance is meant to protect employees from the day they are onboarded. But in reality, that promise often broke at the moment HR tried to add a new hire.
To onboard someone, HR needed enough CD balance. It is similar to a mobile top-up. In case of a mobile, no balance meant no calls. But here, the consequence was far more serious. Instead of not being able to call, someone could be left uninsured.
HRs relied on insurer-issued CD statements that had to be requested manually and often arrived 2 to 5 days later. By the time HR logged in to act, the balance was already outdated.
This mattered because HRs don't use Plum daily. They show up when something important needs to be done like adding a new hire or responding to an employee issue. Unclear balances at that moment led to hesitation.
As a result:
- 38% of HRs missing providing Day-0 coverage because balances appeared insufficient or inaccurate
- 1 in 3 support tickets were related to statement requests, pulling Account Managers into repetitive, time-consuming tasks
What began as a reporting delay turned into a real risk. Employees faced delayed coverage, while support and account management teams carried increasing operational load.
How might we ensure HRs always have transparency around their CD balance data when they need it?
”Approach
From conversations with HRs, Account Managers and Endorsement Team members, it became clear that the core issue wasn't just delayed statements. It was the risk of missing Day-0 coverage because HRs could not act with confidence at the right moment.
Based on these conversations, three priorities became clear.
- HRs needed to know where they stood at the moment they tried to add new employees. Without that clarity, decisions turned into guesswork and coverage got delayed.
- They also needed clarity on which numbers could actually be trusted. Without that confidence, HRs were forced to wait, double-check, or loop in Account Managers just to move forward.
- Finally, we needed to prevent problems instead of surfacing them too late. Low balances had to be flagged early, so HRs could act before coverage was at risk.
This gave the work a clear direction. The solution had to do more than surface numbers. It needed to help HRs act early and confidently while reducing dependency on Account Managers.
Solution
Instead of “giving HR a fish” - burning support and Account Manager hours to chase top-ups, we chose to teach HR how to fish by surfacing timely and trustworthy CD data so they could keep balances healthy on their own and ensure Day-0 coverage.
To follow the solution, it helps to understand how a CD account differs from a regular bank account. In a bank account, credits and debits show up immediately. In a CD account, when HR adds a new employee, the endorsement first has to be completed by the insurer. Until that happens, the balance does not update, and there is no fixed timeline for when it will.
Self-Serve Ledger
Earlier, HRs could see only a single balance that updated after the insurer completed an endorsement. There was no visibility into how recent actions were affecting the CD balance.
We changed this by surfacing every transaction that impacted the CD balance as it happened. Alongside this, we introduced a provisional balance, calculated using the last confirmed insurer balance and the value of transactions initiated on Plum since then.
Overview of Endorsements
Seeing a balance alone was not enough. HRs also needed to understand what was driving changes to that balance.
Each employee addition or removal was captured with the amount, who it was for, and when it happened. This gave HRs a transparent view of endorsements, allowing them to trace money movement and anticipate when a top-up might be needed.
Proactive Nudges
Even with better visibility, HRs were not expected to monitor balances every day.
So we introduced proactive nudges, both within the product and over email. These nudges were triggered based on balance thresholds, guiding HRs to top up before low balances became a blocker.
Impact
HRs missing Day-0 coverage
38 → 12%
CD statement-related support tickets dropped by
24%