Coca-Cola Bottling Company Consolidated

Sold on the idea of a paperless online benefits enrollment solution, the Human Resources department at Coca-Cola Bottling Co. Consolidated first contracted with a large consulting group to implement their off-the-shelf solution. This proved to be neither cost-efficient nor flexible enough to meet the company’s needs.

When the HR group realized that incremental improvements to the benefits administration system would be both expensive and largely self-service, they begin to look for a new solution. They brought in Empowered Benefits and six other online benefits enrollment portal suppliers and evaluated the group of products based on value, quality, flexibility and expandability.

Empowered Benefits proved to be the class of the field, according to Dave Greenberg, Director, Human Resources Shared Services: “We were initially impressed with Empowered Benefits’ online benefits enrollment solutions for other larger employers, and we subsequently engaged them to provide us with a portal; however, it was after the implementation started that we began to realize the true value of partnering with Empowered Benefits.”

Coca-Cola Bottling Co. Consolidated required combined benefits enrollment and HR portal/knowledge base solution to serve its 6,000 employees and to take the burden of manual benefits enrollment off of an already-stretched HR department staff.

Empowered Benefits implemented the online benefits enrollment portion of the solution first, then added the HR portal/knowledge base portal solution at an incremental expense, according to Greenberg.

“We remain impressed with the care that Empowered Benefits and its team put into the implementation and service after the sale,” adds Greenberg. “I wouldn’t call them a boutique shop, but they have both the agility and flexibility to get things done. Moreover, the overall willingness to solve our problem tells me that that’s part of their company culture. We’re very impressed.”

Coca-Cola Bottling Co. Consolidated has experienced a measurable return on investment with the Empowered Benefits benefits administration system that includes more than 12,000 benefits and human resources related questions from employees that were answered via the portal in the first year.

“Those are 12,000 phone calls to the HR department than were avoided by providing common, accessible information on the portal in an easy-to-navigate format for our employees.”