Our Commercial Director, Brandon Collins, shares 10 key questions to ask before renewing your Employee Assistance Programme.
Most EAP renewals go through on autopilot. The contract rolls, the price nudges up and the review meeting lasts twenty minutes. Yet on the industry's own data, roughly 9 in 10 covered employees do not use their EAP in a given year, which is exactly why renewal is the moment to ask the harder questions.
1. What was our usage last year, and how do you define usage?
Auto-renewals are common, and notice periods are often long, sometimes 90 days, while renewal terms can arrive as late as 8 weeks out. That leaves you little room to act, whatever you think of the service, so it pays to review well before the notice window closes. Ask for the number and the definition together, because some providers pad the figure with app downloads, newsletter opens and website visits. A good answer is a clear percentage of covered employees who actually contacted the service, set against the provider's own book average, with an honest view on whether it is good enough.
2. Who answers when someone first gets in touch?
The front door decides whether or not people ever come back. A good answer means a qualified counsellor answers straight away, listens and stays with the problem. Calls being answered in-house are also key, rather than pointing to overflow organisations when busy. A weak answer involves call handlers, scripts or a chatbot doing triage before anyone qualified gets involved.
3. How quickly does someone get help?
The gap between asking for help and getting it is where usage dies. A good answer is being able to get support in the moment, or at your own pace via longer guided or unguided sessions. A weak answer involves callback windows and calls overflowing to other lines.
4. What happens at 2am, or in a crisis?
Those hard moments tend to keep unsociable hours. A good answer is that the service runs the same at night as it does at noon, and that anyone in crisis is connected to a clinician immediately. A weak answer is an out-of-hours voicemail, or a list of other organisations to call instead.
5. What did our people use the service for?
You are owed the themes, anonymised. Money worries, family pressure, work stress, health. A good answer shows breadth and gives you something to act on. A provider who cannot tell you what the service was used for is not really running a service, they are running a phone line. A good provider can also show you PHQ-9 and GAD-7 clinical improvement scores, comparing before and after counselling. What's really key is what percentage of calls go through to actual structured therapy. Recent reviews in the market have shown referral rates ranging from 5% to 50%. Providers may all look the same on paper, offering 6 or 8 counselling sessions plus legal and financial guidance. But therapy is the most time-consuming and expensive part of the service to deliver, so tightly controlling referral rates is one of the easiest ways for a provider to protect margin. Check your usage data and see how it compares. As the old adage goes, you get what you pay for, so if you are going for cheap, cheap is what you may well get: support that falls short of what your employees actually need.
6. What proportion of people who contact you receive support directly?
Some EAPs quietly pass a large share of callers on to charities, websites and self-help resources, often a cost saving tactic. A good answer is that most people are helped by the service itself, with clear routes to counselling when it is needed. High signposting rates mean your people are being redirected, and they notice. Look for high referral rates into in-house counselling.
7. Who are your counsellors, and how are they accredited?
Trust rests on credentials. A good answer names the professional bodies its counsellors are registered with and explains the clinical governance behind the service. A weak answer leans on phrases like "trained advisers" and hopes you won’t dwell on it.
8. What exactly is confidential, and what do we see?
Your people will only use a service they trust. That’s why you need to hear that individual use is completely confidential, the employer only ever sees anonymised, aggregated reporting, and small-team data is protected so nobody can be identified by deduction. Any fuzziness here will cost you usage all year.
9. Does cover extend to family, and would they know?
It is often a partner or a teenager who needs the help first, not the employee. Ask whether immediate family are covered and, just as importantly, whether the provider actively helps you to tell them. Cover that exists on paper and has never been communicated is cover nobody will use, so make sure it's spelled out clearly in any communication materials.
10. What will you do next year to get more people using it?
This is the question weak incumbents dread, because it makes usage a shared responsibility. It's often where providers point to complicated management information, highlighting website content views rather than real, face-to-face or telephone-based support. A good answer is a plan: a promotion calendar, manager training, awareness campaigns and regular reviews of the numbers together, plus a roadmap for the next 12 months covering new features and how the provider keeps pace with evolving employer and employee needs. If the answer amounts to "promotion is down to you," you have learned what the next contract will feel like.
What to do with the answers
If you manage to get strong answers to all ten questions, it means you have a provider worth keeping. Any vague answers to more than a couple mean the renewal conversation should become a market conversation. I have written before about how to choose an EAP provider, which covers what good looks like.
So how does HealthHero measure up against this list?
At HealthHero, we built the service so these questions are easy to answer. A qualified counsellor is available 24 hours a day, 365 days a year; same-day appointments are available if every counsellor is busy, and anyone in crisis is connected to a clinician straight away. Support runs from counselling and online CBT to legal guidance and money and debt help, with immediate family covered. Behind it sit accredited clinicians, clear anonymised reporting and hands-on help to promote the service through the year, because usage is the measure we care about most. More than 70,000 UK organisations run their EAP with us.
We have no gimmicks. Simply put, our average call lengths are longer and clinically determined, our referral rates into structured therapy are higher, with no quotas involved, and many of those referrals go to our own in-house counsellors, so we control quality throughout.
Your EAP renewal is the one moment in the year when you hold the leverage. Ten questions is all it takes to use it. See how HealthHero’s EAP is built to get used. And if your renewal is coming up, we're happy to talk it through before you decide.
