How Outplay - a fast-growing remote startup manages healthcare benefits for its employees

Quick facts about Outplay

Objectives

• Providing best-in-class employee health insurance and benefits.
• Managing health benefits for a fast-growing remote organization. 

Results

• High employee NPS of 78
• Claims CSAT of 9.6
• 100% reduction in time taken to enroll employees in their health benefits.
• Glassdoor rating of 4.9

About Outplay

Outplay, founded by Ram and Laxman Papineni in January 2020, is a new-age sales engagement platform.

The platform is designed for sales teams who contact prospects through multiple channels, like phone calls, emails, SMS, LinkedIn, and Twitter. It automates sequences and integrates the channels into one interface, so salespeople don’t have to create manual follow-ups or switch between apps. 

Since its seed fund round in March 2021 and Series-A in July 2021, Outplay’s revenue has grown 4X, team size has increased 3X, and it now has customers in more than 50 countries. 

Challenges

Back in late 2020, Outplay had less than 20 employees. Today they have close to a hundred.

Hungry for growth while navigating the pandemic, they rapidly pivoted to a remote organization in 2020 to help existing employees be closer to their families and remove any barriers to hiring the best.

Moving to a remote setup brought with it its own set of challenges — keeping employees happy and engaged. 

Solution

We spoke with Bhavya Arora – Talent and Culture Partner at Outplay to understand how Outplay keeps its fast-growing remote workforce of a hundred employees happy and engaged.

“We believe in keeping our employees happy, which in turn keeps our customers happy. Happier customers lead to happier employees. It becomes a full circle”

Bhavya, when asked about Outplay’s culture and philosophy.

Chief among the factors in keeping employees happy and engaged is providing them with a safety net in the form of comprehensive health insurance and benefits for employees and their family members. 

In early 2021, as Outplay grew to a double-digit headcount, Ram and Laxman Papineni saw the need to provide their employees with health insurance and benefits.

Backed by credible investors and with plans and pricing perfectly suited for fast-growing startups, Plum Insurance quickly became the frontrunner for Outplay’s insurance and healthcare benefits needs. 

Results 

An HR dashboard that allowed Outplay to hit the ground running

Aside from startup-friendly pricing, a significant factor in choosing Plum at Outplay was its HR dashboard. 

Unlike traditional corporate insurance brokers, Plum provides an HR platform that makes it extremely easy for users like Bhavya to onboard new employees, configure their policies and benefits, send them their digital health cards and track their claims.

One demo call with the sales team at Plum was all that it took to convince Bhavya and the leadership team at Outplay that we were the right choice for them. 

“What was a process that usually took days with countless spreadsheets and emails now gets done in just a few clicks with Plum,” says Bhavya about the HR platform.   

The cherry on the top was making a company-wide announcement of bringing on board Plum as Outplay’s health benefits partner on Valentine’s day. There couldn’t have been a better way for Ram, Laxman, and Bhavya to show that they really care. 

Hassle-free claims experience

What further helped build and retain trust in Plum was the employees’ claims experience.

Bhavya herself was, unfortunately, hospitalized in 2021. What helped take a significant load off her mind during this difficult situation was Plum’s easy-to-access employee web app and assisted claims experience.

Plum’s employee web app allowed her to access her health card in a matter of minutes while in the hospital, right from her mobile phone. From then on, the handholding by Plum’s claims team helped simplify the paperwork and make the claims process entirely hassle-free without any back and forth. 

Continuing the partnership with Plum 

This was a pivotal moment in Outplay renewing and continuing their partnership with Plum even after growing 3X in employee count.

Despite having other competitors in the fray, another factor in renewing their partnership with Plum was the employee platform and added benefits. 

“Other players in the market had apps with unnecessarily complicated user interfaces. Moving to another vendor would mean added friction for our employees. Plum’s easy-to-use interface combined with their excellent customer service made it a no-brainer to pick.”

Bhavya Arora

Plum wellness to keep employees engaged

Keeping a check on employee wellness isn’t always easy in a remote setup, and Plum’s suite of healthcare benefits — specifically, the weekly wellness sessions perfectly fit the bill.

The impact

As a young startup with no baggage, Outplay has been at the forefront of creating a culture of care for its employees and customer-happiness-driven organization. 

Plum being an organization driven by the same north star metrics, the success of the partnership between Plum and Outplay was a given. 

Since the beginning of the partnership in 2020, Plum has delivered Outplay with a consistently high customer service experience. This has been showcased with a consistently high claims CSAT of 9.6 and contributed to a high Employee NPS of 78. 

Check out Bhavya's fireside chat with VCM from Plum here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nvBCiL1LiDs&ab_channel=Plum

Give us a shout-out on Twitter.

https://twitter.com/getplumhq/status/1537772693315256320