In employee benefits, the organization that buys a product is rarely the person who has to use it. An employer signs the contract. A broker recommends it. A member, sometimes months later, decides whether to download the app, file the claim online, or book the appointment. Revenue is recognized at the first step. Value is created, or lost, at the last one.
That gap shapes how adoption problems get diagnosed. When utilization disappoints, the reflex in most organizations is to send more: another email, a refreshed toolkit for HR, a new campaign. Sometimes that is the right call. Often it is the most expensive way to avoid the real problem.
Low adoption is a symptom, not a diagnosis
"Members aren't using it" can mean at least four different things, and each one points to a different owner.
- Awareness. People don't know the benefit exists. This is a marketing problem.
- Relevance. They know, but don't see why it matters to them now. This is a positioning and timing problem.
- Friction. They try, and something stops them. This is usually a product, operational, or even legal problem.
- Value. They use it once and don't come back. This is a problem with the experience itself.
Only the first is purely a marketing problem, yet adoption budgets are often spent as if it were the only one. More communication can't fix a broken step. It just sends more people into it.
Watch where people stop
The most useful adoption measure is rarely at the top of the funnel. Reach and open rates tell you whether a message was delivered. They don't tell you whether behavior changed, or where it failed to.
At Unum, a behavioral health benefit offered through Meru Health made this plain. Members were entering the journey and then dropping out at a self-assessment, where some hit errors, before they could book a therapist. More promotion would have pushed more members into the same wall. Working with Product, we moved the assessment after the "Book a Therapist" step. Completion rose 68%.
At Anthem, when Virtual Primary Care launched in the Sydney Care app, registration trailed far behind app opens: 46% of members registered, compared with 80% who installed and opened the app. The causes had nothing to do with messaging. One-time passcodes were failing under server load, and required legal disclaimers sat in front of registration. I led a cross-functional team with Product, IT, and Analytics, working with Legal, that fixed passcode delivery and moved the disclaimers to virtual care enrollment, where they still did their job. Registration rose to 80%.
Neither fix was a campaign. Both were adoption wins.
Most adoption problems look like awareness problems until you watch where people stop.
Marketing sees the problem first, but rarely owns the fix
Marketing often spots the drop-off before anyone else because it watches the whole journey, from the employer announcement to the member's first use. But the step that breaks usually lives in someone else's roadmap. Product owns the flow. IT owns the infrastructure. Legal owns the disclaimer. Operations owns the service model.
That means adoption leaders earn influence through evidence rather than authority. A clear view of exactly where members stop, and what it costs, does more to move another team's priorities than a request for support. In both cases above, the fix came from a small group across functions looking at the same data, not from a marketing plan.
It also helps to describe adoption in the business's terms. The case for digital self-service at Unum was never engagement for its own sake. Every claim or payment handled by phone added service cost. Electronic claims adoption rose 23.3 percentage points and digital payments rose 36.9%, while service requests fell 23%. Those results came from Marketing, Product, and Analytics working from the same numbers, and they mattered to people well outside marketing.
Reaching an audience is not the same as moving it
In a B2B2C market, employers and brokers aren't just distribution channels. They are audiences with their own motives. An HR leader wants fewer questions and a benefit employees value. A broker wants clients who renew. Members want the thing to work the first time. Each deserves its own message and its own tools.
But the measure of success is still what the member does. Toolkits distributed and emails opened are activity. Claims filed online, appointments completed, and service calls avoided are outcomes. Confusing the two is how programs look busy and stay flat.
Five questions before the next campaign
- Which behavior are we trying to change, and can we measure it directly?
- Where exactly do people stop, and what do they experience at that step?
- Is this an awareness, relevance, friction, or value problem?
- Who owns the failing step, and what evidence would move it up their list?
- What does non-adoption cost the business, in service cost, retention, or outcomes?
If the answer to the third question is friction, the next dollar probably shouldn't go to more communication.