HR teams are no longer choosing benefits vendors on price and plan design alone. A new survey of HR professionals who manage health savings accounts and other spending accounts finds that employee complaints, not cost or features, have become the leading trigger for switching providers, a shift that is quietly rewriting how HR departments buy and keep benefits technology.
The finding comes from InComm Benefits, a division of InComm Payments, which surveyed more than 300 HR professionals responsible for HSAs and other spending accounts and published the results on August 5, 2026, in a report titled “The Spending Account Experience Gap.” Seventy-three percent of respondents named employee feedback as the top factor they weigh when reevaluating a spending account provider, ahead of cost, technology features, or account options.
The complaint desk has become a procurement signal
The survey describes a pattern familiar to any HR leader who has fielded a benefits question mid-open-enrollment: nearly six in ten HR professionals (58.5%) said they regularly field employee questions about their spending accounts, covering what purchases qualify, how to submit a claim, how to check a balance, and what happens to unused funds at year end. Those questions are not just an administrative drag. They are becoming the data HR uses to decide whether a vendor stays or goes.
“Employees are not necessarily disengaged from their benefits. Many are simply unsure how to use them,” said Dave Etling, SVP and GM of InComm Benefits, in the announcement of the findings.
That distinction matters for how HR interprets the complaints it receives. A high volume of employee questions has historically read as an employee-education problem, something to fix with a better onboarding email or a benefits fair. InComm’s data suggests HR departments are increasingly treating it as a vendor-performance problem instead, one that shows up in renewal conversations and RFPs rather than in the next open-enrollment newsletter.
Where HR says the experience breaks down
Asked what would most improve the employee experience with spending accounts, 55% of HR professionals pointed to more flexible benefit options, 52% cited simplified education, and 52% cited better technology. The overlap between those three answers points to a single underlying complaint: employees are being handed a financial product, often with a mobile app, a debit card, and a set of IRS eligibility rules attached, with too little support to use it well.
The survey also found HR departments increasingly open to closing that gap with AI. Fifty-five percent of respondents said they were enthusiastic about AI tools for their department, and 57% said they already use AI in some form of education or training related to benefits administration, whether that is an AI-assisted chatbot answering eligibility questions or AI-generated explainer content replacing static PDFs.
What it means for the HR leader
For HR leaders managing HSAs, FSAs, or other spending accounts, the InComm findings suggest three practical shifts worth making before the next renewal cycle. First, track employee questions and complaints about a spending account vendor as a metric, not just noise, since that volume is what increasingly drives the switch decision. Second, treat “flexible options,” “simplified education,” and “better technology” as the three levers a vendor pitch should address directly, because those are the specific gaps HR peers say matter most. Third, evaluate whether a vendor’s AI-assisted support (chat-based eligibility answers, automated claims guidance) is mature enough to reduce the HR team’s own question load, since more than half of HR departments are already using AI in this exact function.
The InComm survey lands alongside other 2026 research on the rising cost side of benefits: the projected 14% jump in small-group health premiums for 2027 means HR teams will be under more pressure than ever to prove that what they are already spending on benefits technology is working, not just tolerated.
The AI education gap is not unique to benefits
The InComm data also lines up with a broader theme in HR technology this year: tools are outrunning the training built to support them. Recent research on AI adoption in the workplace found a similar divide between organizations that invest in structured training and those that expect employees to figure new tools out on their own, with the trained group reporting meaningfully better outcomes. Spending accounts, effectively a financial product wrapped in a benefits enrollment process, appear to be a smaller-scale version of the same problem: the technology exists, but the education layer that makes it usable often does not.
Why vendors should be paying attention too
The shift also changes what spending-account providers need to sell. A benefits platform pitched purely on account types, contribution limits, or card design is increasingly competing on a dimension it may not be measuring: how few questions employees have to ask HR in the first place. The 73% figure suggests that HR buyers are starting to evaluate vendors the way they would evaluate any other workplace software, on the support burden it creates or removes, not just the feature list in the sales deck. That is a meaningful change for an HSA and FSA administration market that has historically competed on compliance accuracy and network breadth rather than day-to-day usability.
It also raises the bar for what “AI-powered” means in a benefits RFP. Enthusiasm for AI tools was high in the survey (55%), but the more telling number is the 57% already using AI somewhere in benefits education or training. That is not early experimentation; it is current practice, which means HR leaders evaluating a new spending-account vendor can reasonably ask what that vendor’s own AI-assisted support looks like today, not what is on its roadmap.
What to do next
HR teams do not need to wait for a renewal cycle to act on this data. Auditing the last two quarters of employee questions about an HSA or FSA vendor, even informally through a shared inbox or help-desk tag, will show whether the InComm pattern holds internally. If flexibility, education, and technology are the recurring themes, that is a case to bring to the vendor before the next contract conversation, not after enrollment numbers already reflect the frustration.
Source: InComm Benefits (PR Newswire)
