AEP / OEP Doesn’t Start in October. It Starts Now.

If your Enrollment Period went sideways last year, you’re not alone. The question is what comes next.
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The teams that make the next Enrollment Period meaningfully different don’t start planning in late summer. They start immediately, while the experience is still fresh and the facts are still clear. That early window is where real improvement happens.
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Here’s ClearTurn’s point of view: Enrollment Period isn’t a seasonal scramble. It’s an operational capability. And the fastest way to repeat last year is to treat it like a two-month event instead of a year-round operating rhythm.

What “an unsuccessful Enrollment Period” really means…

When organizations say their enrollment was a mess, it usually shows up in the same place: service levels.

Wait times spike. People call, hang up, they call back again. Frustration develops   into complaints, escalations, and potentially lost members.  Then it compounds internally. When the work becomes chaotic and unsupported, employee experience drops fast. Attrition rises. And once attrition starts during enrollment, the model collapses.

The early warning signs appear long before fall

Most leaders start looking for risk in August. The real signals show up earlier:
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• You’re already running lean in steady state (service levels are strained before enrollment begins)
  
  
• Attrition is higher than expected
  
  
• A market shift happens  (a competitor exits, you expand into a new geography, benefits or regulations change)
  
  

Enrollment doesn’t create underlying capacity problems. It reveals them at high volume.

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Why hiring isn’t damage control

A common pattern for AEP looks like this:
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October feels manageable. Mid-November gets busy. Then Thanksgiving through early December hits and everything breaks.
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At that point, hiring more people isn’t a solution. Hiring and training takes time. Supervisors are already stretched. Everyone is doing more than their day job.
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That’s why effective enrollment period hiring happens early, paired with a clear support and contingency plan (you did build a contingency plan right?) Once you’re in peak volume, the work shifts from staffing to stabilization.

The most underestimated mitigation strategy: training and support model design

Many teams train enrollment staff the same way they train full-time employees. They try to teach everything.
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That approach is unnecessary and often wasteful.The success of your enrollment period depends on aligning training to the type of staff you’re bringing in– whether contractors, temporary hires, part-time employees, or BPO support– and focusing only on what’s required for the enrollment window.
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Faster ramp paired with strong real-time support consistently outperforms longer, generalized training programs. That means: 
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• Training what truly matters for the enrollment window
• Re-skilling existing staff to support enrollment-specific call flows
• Building real-time support through coaching, help lines, escalation paths, and knowledge management
• Designing a leadership and support structure that can absorb an influx of new hires

For a small team, adding 20 or 30 people can be just as disruptive as adding hundreds in a large organization. The scale changes, but the need for structure doesn’t.
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The goal isn’t longer training. It’s faster ramp plus stronger support.

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Ownership is where execution succeeds or fails

Enrollment period execution gets fuzzy when everyone “shares accountability” but no one owns it.
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ClearTurn’s view: operations must own enrollment. Cross-functional teams need to be in the boat, but operations has to drive the plan, daily analysis, quick decision making , and rapid adjustments as reality changes.

But wait… you’re not done yet 

Even teams that survive their busy period often get blindsided by the post-enrollment service spike.  That’s when new members start calling at scale.
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Many organizations don’t plan for this at all, even though it’s a first impression moment for new members, and a retention risk if the experience is poor.
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If your Enrollment Period  plan ends on the last day of enrollment, you’re only planning for half the reality.

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What high-performing teams do differently

The best teams aren’t successful because they got lucky. They’re successful because they’re disciplined, made a plan, and used it. 
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They: 

• Monitor performance daily and make micro-adjustments quickly
• Coordinate across workforce, training, HR, finance, quality, and operations
• Keep leaders visible and consistent, especially under pressure
• Communicate performance clearly, so leadership understands what’s happening, where pressure points exist, and how adjustments are being made in real time
  
  

This is what enrollment readiness looks like in practice: alignment, rhythm, and follow-through.

The executive takeaway

If last year was painful, the move isn’t to promise everyone you’ll “do better next time.”
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The move is to start now:

• Run a real retrospective
• Quantify what actually broke and why:  what is driving customers to call and how do you mitigate?
• Design a staffing, training, and support model that holds under pressure
• Build a contingency playbook before you need it
• Plan for the January–February service surge, not just enrollment itself
  
  

AEP doesn’t start in October. It starts the moment you decide you’re not repeating last year.
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ClearTurn helps teams step out of reaction mode and build the operational discipline every enrollment period demands. We focus on the decisions that need to happen earlier, the structures that need to be clearer, and the systems that have to work when pressure is highest.
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If your enrollment period didn’t go the way you planned last year, now is the moment to change the outcome. Start the conversation now.

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