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November 11, 2024
November 8, 2024
In today’s business world, having an ideal leader with a clear vision who understands its people is vital. Taking account of the current challenging situation, they should be able to build a unique culture that makes their team member feel passionate about the company and the vision. William (Bill) Catuzzi (Founder and CEO of Clarity Benefit Solutions) is a visionary leader who is consistently working to build a culture of innovation, technology and sincerity. Over time, Bill’s leadership has changed and matured.
“I am an entrepreneurial CEO, which means I have new ideas all the time and I am always passionate about them. Eventually, I realized constantly pushing the team to maintain our high standard of support while also working on multiple new products and services can put undue stress on my management team. And, that stress can filter down to our team members,” states Bill. Today, employees need a leader who understands their concerns and takes those into account at they manage the day-to-day goals of the company. Bill works tirelessly to balance the priorities of the team. He adds, “That is not to say I don’t push the team to develop new and innovative products, but we are more strategic with timing and launch plans. This change in approach has helped us to keep the vision clear and the team passionate.”
As Founder and CEO, Bill oversees every aspect of the business, his passion is sales, marketing, and vision. Bill founded Clarity (formerly BeneFlex) in 1990. Prior to that he founded and successfully sold several companies including Total Pay, and Paylocity of N.J. Bill is a Trustee and active supporter of First Star Academy and an active alumnus of St. Peters University where he received a BS in accounting.
Bill began his journey with Charity with a mission to make employee benefits easy and affordable. For over 30 years, the company’s goal has been to provide meaningful solutions for today’s challenges while creating opportunities for the future. Incepted in 1990, Charity Benefit Solutions’ goal has been to use technology to simplify the administration of benefits, reduce costs, and empower consumers.
Initially, the company was known as BeneFlex, one of the first providers of Flexible Benefit Plans. Over the years, it has expanded its services to include various pre-tax consumer benefits, online enrollment, HRIS, and mobile technology. It has established Clarity to continue the corporate mission. Clarity brings benefits to focus by combining all of the offerings into one platform. By offering cloud-based software and backing it with skilled customer service, it makes life easier for everyone involved.
“We know benefits can be confusing, so our Ready for Life solutions are designed to replace frustration with innovation, delivering state-of-the-art programs and tools that are tailored to your needs, easy-to-use, and supported by a dedicated service team,” says Bill. At Clarity, the team strives to improve the offering every day for its employers and the client’s employees. Bill strongly believes that happy employees lead to happy clients and this philosophy has worked for the company. By providing the experienced staff with great tools, a flexible work environment, and opportunities for advancement, the company has been able to maintain a 30–40% growth rate while achieving a 97% client retention rate.
As a testament to the company’s professional excellence, Clarity also received a 55 Net Promoter Score (NPS) for Consumer Benefits in 2020, which measures customers’ willingness to recommend the product or service to others. NPS is the gold standard of customer experience metrics and measures the loyalty of customers to a company on a scale of – 100 to +100. Its NPS not only classifies as a world-class service provider but is also 3x higher than the industry average of 14. The company also received a 65 NPS with its Brokers and 75 NPS with the COBRA clients, proving it delivers the industry’s best customer service.
With the Clarity Mobile App, participants can take the guesswork out of healthcare spending and saving decisions. It includes a personalized, real-time, and self-guided experience that ensures participants have access to not only powerful self-service capabilities such as viewing and managing their Clarity, submitting claims, and accessing account alerts but also actionable insights that lead them down a path to better healthcare spending and saving behaviors. The Clarity App combines health and wealth in one location, giving your employees personalized low-cost, high-quality healthcare options and making users smarter consumers of healthcare by guiding them to spend less now and save more for the future. Features of the app include
The COVID-19 pandemic has caused numerous problems which unsettled business and human lives from all over the world. Some companies were forced to shut down while others struggled with how to manage their day-to-day operations. However, at the same time, companies like Charity stood out with a strong response to the COVID-19 crisis. Under the leadership of Bill, the company was striving to provide as much certainty, clarity, and stability as possible. Sharing his experience, Bill says, “We stated upfront that we would not have any lay-offs, we provided every team member with $500 to reimburse them for their home office expense, we sent COVID care packages to every employee, had monthly virtual Town Halls and team building events.”
During the pandemic, Charity found ways to reduce costs in other areas so they could keep their promises and keep all the employees whole. The company instituted a hiring freeze; its executives took a temporary reduction in pay and temporarily minimized some of the benefit programs. COVID-19 was and continues to be a very changeling time, but Charity has gotten through it by consistently putting its people first.
Clarity also put its customers first. Early on the pandemic Clarity realized that companies needed ways to help their employees with resources outside traditional benefits. In April of 2020, Clarity introduced the Clarity Care Account – allowing employers to provide tax free financial support to employees during the COVID-19 pandemic. They funds can be used to pay for healthcare but also home office, education, and COBRA expenses.
In July of 2020, Clarity introduced a vaccine incentive tool called SimplyWell – Rewards. Clarity SimplyWell Rewards helps employers accelerate the safe reopening of their offices by providing an incentive in the form of a monetary reward rather than a mandate. With this solution, employers can easily understand the percentage of vaccinated employees and offer them a pulse survey so they can understand the concerns on their employees.
In addition to these new solutions, Clarity also created simple, online tools that allowed clients to quickly and easily take advantage of many of the regulatory changes that occurred due to the pandemic.
Benefits is an ever-changing industry. New regulations, new offerings, new technology are always on the horizon. To adapt to these changing demands, Bill and his team at Charity are constantly innovating and offering its customers the solutions they need.
The team is always willing to consider out-of-the-box ideas, listen to all feedback both internally and externally, and encourage collaboration. Besides meeting with the teams weekly, the management team also holds bi-monthly roundtables. These sessions are designed to update the company on a department-specific initiative and provide a space for all employees to ask questions about the direction of each department and offer suggestions for new ideas, changes, or problem resolutions. “I also host monthly virtual coffee talks with 10-12 employees. By hosting smaller more intimate meetings I’m able to better connect with each employee. They feel safe asking me the tough questions and during this session, I ask them what they are hearing from customers, what we need to be focused on as a company and I encourage new ideas and honest dialogue,” asserts Bill.
Working in this ever-changing industry, Charity focuses on making the product or service better than the competitors – it focuses on leapfrogging the competition. The innovations introduced must make big changes that disrupt the industry and take years for the competitors to catch up. At Clarity, everything it does is 10 times smarter than the competition. By saying “10 times smarter”, it makes innovation part of its DNA. Continuing its successful run in the coming years, Bill concludes, “I believe the convergence of artificial intelligence and access to data is going to be crucial in our industry. We plan to harness this convergence to provide our clients with solutions that simplify their decisions, provide superior customer service, and simplify every process in our industry.”
