Health benefits experience platform League poised for market leadership with Salesforce

League has breathed new life into the North American health insurance market with its trailblazing digital platform and personalized approach. Founded in 2014, the League Health Benefits Experience platform provides a single access point for employees to better manage their health, lifestyle and benefits programs.

“We want to empower people to live healthier and happier lives,” said Evan Little, Director of Growth for League. “We envision a future of healthcare that is personalized, preventative, digital and always on.”

League’s approach has proved a big hit with both plan members and administrators: 94% of its customers say they would recommend the company and its employer Net Promoter Score is more than seven times the health insurance industry average. 

League started small, targeting companies with around 25 to 50 employees, but it’s since moved into the enterprise space, and now counts Unilever, Lush Cosmetics, and Uber among its hundreds of customers.

Salesforce has played a key role in enabling League to win new business with high-profile brands. “To scale up, we needed a partner that was like us - both adaptable and agile,” said Evan Little, Director of Growth, League. “With Salesforce we've been able to scale a level of personalization and digitization never before seen in our industry.”

Since deploying Salesforce in 2016, League has gone from strength to strength. In Q1 2018, it saw a ten-fold increase in new customer signings compared with the same period in 2017, and in Q1 2019 hit a new high, winning new customers with thousands of employees. “Sales Cloud is a single source of truth for the sales operations team,” said Steve Dinner, Director of Business Development and Sales Operations at League. “It provides insights into deal status as well as key metrics, such as the velocity of the sales cycle, which helps us identify trends and make better decisions.” 

A shift from demand generation to account-based marketing helped to fuel League’s rapid rise. Pioneered by Little and Dinner, account-based marketing has tripled the company’s ability to book meetings with enterprise customers. “We don’t want to just fill the pipeline with prospects, we want to populate it with ideal future customers,” explained Dinner. “With Salesforce, we can more effectively prioritize our accounts lists using engagement and intent signals.”

Nurturing larger businesses requires a multi-channel approach that goes beyond the standard sales outreach playbook. League is leveraging direct mail, dynamic landing pages, events, and personalized advertisements, to name a few, to open the door at new accounts. League uses Pardot to track these different activities with prospects and to measure their contribution to getting a deal over the finish line. “We feel we’ve cracked the code when it comes to account-based marketing,” said Little. “With Salesforce, we’re not just landing more business, we’re landing it twice as fast.”

Sales reps can also push out email communications to prospects in a shorter timeframe. “With Pardot, templates are dynamically customized in a matter of seconds,” explained Little. “Every rep can run a personalized campaign for every account automatically.”

Smarter email communications have also helped League to drive member lifecycle engagement and boost enrollment, leading to its industry-leading monthly active users metric, which stands at an impressive 63%.

League uses Marketing Cloud to create personalized journeys for members that encourage them to take advantage of the features and products it offers in its web platform and app. “With Marketing Cloud, we’re able to improve our engagement metrics across various member segments while increasing automation that enables us to scale,” said Jessica Gale, AVP of Member Engagement at League. “By targeting members with dynamic content that aligns with their interests, we have increased engagement in our lifestyle programs by 150%.”

To ensure its members enjoy a seamless experience, League uses Service Cloud to capture in-bound queries from employees and employers’ human resources teams. “The cost and complexity of providing health benefits is increasing for both employees and employers,” said Henry Hayes, Director of Customer Care at League. “Our approach eliminates that fragmentation and frustration.”

More than 40-plus customer service agents use Service Cloud to respond to thousands of inquiries per month and to access member information. Thanks to the flexibility of the solution, League has been able to customize reporting, escalation processes, and queue prioritization.

“Since switching to Service Cloud, we’ve halved our first response time and answer emails in less than an hour,” explained Hayes. “We can now tap into a wealth of analytics that add value to our customer service operation.” For example, League has been able to develop targeted email responses for common problems, which has reduced repetitive questions and increased email engagement between members and customer service agents by 10%.

As its member base grows, League will be able to unlock even more meaningful insights to drive the business forward. “We’re really excited about the potential of Einstein and predictive analytics,” said Little. “With Salesforce, we can achieve greater success and stay nimble.”