Comment by chetanahuja | Hacker News Reader

Comment by chetanahuja | Hacker News Reader

"Give the illusion of self-service, but actually have a very high-touch, highservice model - Feedback we’ve gotten from groups that have left Zenefits to come back to the broker + Maxwell model is the increasingly poor level of service and responsiveness to urgent issues."

This rings true for us. We're a small company who would've blindly walked into zenefits if they had simply walked us through our enrollment process smoothly. Instead we had repeated paperwork glitches which always left out a few of us (from a very small group already) employees out of the quote/enrollment process.

We started looking at Trinet in parallel and to our astonishment found that the comparable health plans, from the same provider, available on Trinet, were significantly cheaper... (as in ... ~30%) for our situation. The Zenefits glitches were really a blessing in disguise for us.

(The key to these discounts was that with Trinet you're getting into a group plan... while Zenefits simply enrolls you as individuals if you're a small startup).

This matches with my recent (April) experience doing benefits shopping.

I evaluated TriNet, JustWorks, Zenefits, and individual brokers.

We decided to go with a PEO for the same reasons. Not only is Zenefits just a broker, their quotes for insurance (which were MORE expensive for WORSE coverage) had a note at the bottom "These are just an estimate; prices subject to change based on <reasons> upon enrollment".

TriNet and JustWorks gave me firm pricing, had historical data on price increases, and gave me a contract stating they wouldn't rise above X%. Zenefits gave me none of these.

As a small business, our largest non-salary expense is benefits. The small price per employee per year for TriNet or JustWorks was more than paid for in cheaper, better benefits and peace of mind that I wasn't going to get HR sticker shock next year.

Yes, Zenefits has a slick, nice web UI - TriNet's is terrible - but a) I hardly need to go into it and b) neither does anyone else.

Right. I'm biased since I work at Justworks, but I'd argue that going w/ a PEO like Justworks (or Trinet in your case) offers both a better setup experience and a better software experience.

People talk about the fact that PEOs let you basically group-buy benefits (which is how you were able to get ~30% off your health plans), but the other nice thing about the PEO model is that it lets us bring everything (payroll/benefits/compliance) in-house, so we have full control over the entire experience and you don't have to worry about integrations.

> Give the illusion of self-service, but actually have a very high-touch, highservice model

100% true.

We've used Zenefits for one year and it was very, very painful. It looks like self-service, but whatever you do in the UI is then processed manually. Out of 10 employees, 6 got big mistakes in their benefits. I had to delay a treatment because I was not sure I would be covered. It tooks 6 months to get everybody's benefits right.

I can second this. We've been with Zenefits for over a year now and the issues don't stop. Many of their "integations" occur in meatspace: when a change is made on the Zenefits dashboard, a Zenefits employee then manually updates the related service(s). This has resulted in a number of errors over the course of a year.

Additionally their are still issues with validation on their dashboard. We had a problem where the dashboard allowed an invalid value to be entered for a monthly 401k contribution that was a big pain to unwind.

So true. We tried Zenefits a while back, and the experience was terrible for our admin. Lots of missing info, uninformed reps, etc. However, we are back since we want, even need something better. It has been an improvement, so I chalk it up to growing pains.

When we tried Zenefits out last year, they were very transparent about this. The rep I spoke with told me upfront that a PEO would be more cost effective for a company of our size.

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