Yusuf Jimenez· Senior Compensation Analyst, Beacon Retail Group
Posted in Benefits & Wellbeing ·
I have bought four wellbeing apps in nine years across two employers: meditation, sleep, digital physiotherapy and a general wellbeing hub. I have the usage data for all of them and I no longer believe most of it was money well spent.
The pattern was identical each time. 20 to 30% register in the launch month. By month six, monthly active use is 3 to 5%, and those users are overwhelmingly people who were already well. The physiotherapy one is the exception, because it replaced something people needed and would otherwise have waited weeks for.
My view now is that money should go to things that change the work itself or give access to actual clinical care. I expect disagreement and would like to hear it.
5 helpful · 2 insightful · 1 agree · 6 replies · 204 views · 4 following
Bianca WalshCEP
Job Architecture Lead, Pinehurst Foods
No disagreement here. We cancelled a meditation app with 2.8% monthly use at a German engineering company of 5,000 and received four emails about it. The money now funds an extra day a week of on-site occupational physician time, which is booked solid.
Sales Compensation Manager, Pinehurst Foods
I will disagree, at least partly. 4% monthly active use across 10,000 people is 400 people using something every month for a few pounds a head. I have core insured benefits with lower utilisation than that and nobody calls those a failure. The question is the cost per person helped, not the percentage.
Victor PereiraCBS, GRS
Sales Compensation Manager, Qasr Holdings
The cost per active user is the right measure and it is exactly where these fall down. Ours worked out at 61 euros per active user per month once you divide the licence by people actually using it. For that money I could fund an individual subscription for anyone who asked and still save two thirds of the budget.
Director of Benefits, Bellwether Consulting
The point about already-well users is the one that matters most to me. We matched app usage against occupational health referrals, anonymised and in aggregate. Overlap was close to zero. The people who are struggling are not opening a wellbeing app.
Director of Benefits, Bellwether Consulting
Part of this is on us as buyers. We accept registration as the headline measure in contracts. I now insist on pricing per active user per month with a floor, and two suppliers walked away rather than agree. That told me what they expected their own engagement to be.
Total Rewards Manager, Aurora Hospitality
The per-active-user pricing point is excellent and I have not managed to get that through procurement yet. I accept the argument about absolute numbers, and I think it holds for the cheap ones. It is the broad hub products at enterprise prices that I cannot defend any more.
