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boise's comments

boise | 9 years ago | on: Zenefits Loses Over Half of Its Value

Zenefits screwed up a bunch of our state registrations and payroll taxes. The worst thing was the hideous customer service in trying to resolve this.

boise | 11 years ago | on: Zenefits (YC W13) Just Raised $500M at a $4.5B Valuation

Agreed, and it's a running theme in most customer service interactions with Zenefits (Aetna's fault, Intuit's fault, etc.). There's also tends to be long delays in response times because of the back and forth between Zenefits and the provider, and sometimes conflicting responses which make things really frustrating.

boise | 11 years ago | on: Zenefits (YC W13) Just Raised $500M at a $4.5B Valuation

Yes, this is 100% true! My main point was not about the cost of the plans, so much as getting access to better plans. E.g. with Trinet we were able to get access to PPOs that had some out of network coverage. With Zenefits, as a standalone company of our size we only had access to EPOs (i.e. no coverage if a blood test or something got accidentally sent to an out of network provider.)

boise | 11 years ago | on: Zenefits (YC W13) Just Raised $500M at a $4.5B Valuation

This is also true of a PEO (e.g. Trinet).

Yes, Zenefits has a gorgeous interface which feels much more modern and sleek than something like Trinet. The trade-off is that the healthcare benefits are inferior for a small company - because unlike a PEO, Zenefits is NOT pooling together tens of thousands of young, healthy employees across many companies and getting a good deal from insurance companies. Yes, as an employer, you don't play the hefty admin fee you pay Trinet - but you just don't have access to better plans for your employees.

The other pain we've found is that at the end of the day Zenefits is simply a wrapper around third party services (healthcare insurance, payroll etc.). If everything is smooth sailing, there is no problem. the moment something goes wrong there's this super frustrating finger pointing session where you have to call Aetna directly, or Intuit Payroll and Zenefits blame each other, or no one wants to cop to a payroll tax filing error. If you have an employee waiting for some critical healthcare reimbursement, this he-said/she-said is the worst. Never had to deal with that with the one-stop-shop PEOs.

Zenefits has great software but the customer service needs some catching up. Maybe this round of funding will do it.

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