Surprising Popularity of an Unlikely Benefit

We have to be honest with you. It’s time to come clean.

Despite all the research on the employee satisfaction with pet discount programs… Despite all the positive feedback we received about it…we were still hesitant to offer the CH Complete Card with PetAssure.

We were attracted to the other options instead: to the telemedicine and its logical reward for employers; the travel assist and its appealing offerings; and the fitness club discounts in this age of wellness programs. But pet health care? This seemed frivolous.

Today, let us tell you about how we were wrong, and our experience with this unlikely benefit’s surprising popularity.

Honesty.

It’s been nearly a year since we first rolled out our CH Complete Card with its telemedicine, health club markdowns, and either travel assistance or pet care discounts. The motivations to offer the other non-insurance benefits on the Card were obvious—telemedicine, for example, is proven to decrease both physician visits and non-emergency ER visits by up to 65%. But why pet care discounts? Do employers and employees really recognize pet care as a compensation perk?

Honestly, we weren’t certain of that answer when we were first assembling this product. Despite all the research on employee satisfaction with pet discount programs and despite all the positive feedback we received about it, we were hesitant to offer the CH Complete Card with PetAssure. In fact, we built the Card with an interchangeable option, so that clients can utilize either PetAssure or travel assistance in conjunction with telemedicine and fitness club discounts.

To reference what we’re reading, though, sometimes, in order to see true value, you have to move away from traditional quantitative marketing tools and toward anthropological observation of real employee behavior.

What convinced us

While pet health care discounts may not always appeal to us (or to some C-suite), our consultants have seen it become an instant hit with employees. Sometimes what executives want is not exactly what employees want. These initial client HR teams understood what we failed to immediately recognize: pet health care discounts generate high employee satisfaction at a very low cost.

Plus, any of our lingering doubts were easily put to rest by the quantitative data, which is substantial enough to break down even the strongest C-level argument against it. One of our consultant partners, as you may remember from an earlier newsletter, used the CH Complete Card to drive his client’s conversion to a high deductible plan—using the Card, the enrollment for the HDHP had tripled its enrollment for the previous year and reduced overall health care costs by one percent (even after adding the new employer-paid Card).

A few months after we began offering the CH Complete Card with PetAssure, the Wall Street Journal ran an article titled, “The Dog Maxed Out My Credit Card.” The article highlighted the rise of pet health care costs (rising 47% over ten years for dogs and 73% over ten years for cats… nearly the same rate as human health care costs), as well as some of the new options that individuals have to get pet insurance or discount programs in order to cover those rising costs. Noted in the article was PetAssure, the very program that we had previously debated including in our Card!

Then, a few weeks ago, Employee Benefit Adviser ran a feature of pet discount programs and how they are being utilized by brokers as an additional voluntary offering. Again, it was PetAssure. We don’t offer PetAssure as a standalone option, and, by now, the product had proven itself to us, but it was gratifying to see it highlighted here again: one consultant in the article went so far as to say, “From the producer's standpoint, once you’re in the door, you can talk about anything. [PetAssure] may be the best door opener that we've ever had."

That WSJ article notes, “When asked how much they’d spend to save their pet’s life, 70% of owners said, ‘any amount,’ according to a 2006 survey of VPI policyholders.” What both EBA and the Journal outlined was the conclusion we had already reached: employees want this offering, and they will view this with high satisfaction as a form of compensation on par with other quality voluntary benefits.

Serving you

Since we offer innovative solutions for group benefits, we built the CH Complete Card after looking at it from every angle. The payoff for employers is big, since the Card is an inexpensive new benefit that drives cost savings, but the incentive for employees is big, too. It’s big enough to offset some of the reductions in employers’ major medical programs. It’s big enough to effectively drive engagement of consumer plans, as many of you, our consultant partners, are doing. It’s big enough to get your foot in the door when you’re prospecting for a new client. Big. The reward for our consultants is even more obvious—employee satisfaction equals client satisfaction, and the Card’s low-cost features ease the implementation of other benefit plan strategies.

According to the American Pet Products Association’s 2009-10 National Pet Owners Survey, 62 percent of U.S. households own a pet, which equates to 71.4 million homes. The survey indicated that $12.79 billion is spent annually on veterinary care alone.

So when we tell you we offer a product that bundles telemedicine, fitness club discounts, and pet health care discounts… will you please not laugh? We understand: we laughed once, too. But a Card that offers reductions in claims cost along with features that guarantee high satisfaction levels for employees with minimal cost to the employer—well, that is no laughing matter.

And if you are still laughing, at least check out the travel assistance option instead.

This article was first featured in the June 12th edition of our e-newsletter, Directions. If you'd like to receive that weekly email, contact directions@continuoushealth.com. (Your email will never be shared, sold, or otherwise distributed, and you will receive only the type of content for which you sign up.)

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