Travis Software Official Blog

Travis announces its new “Tuesday Tips” blog that contains helpful suggestions and instructions for various functions in either our desktop or web-based systems. On the first Tuesday of each month, “Tuesday Tips” will discuss and demonstrate a feature in the system that we find our Users asking about or an aspect of the system that is used often.

Enhancements are added to our systems throughout the year, and “Tuesday Tips” will describe some of these new features so new Users may take full advantage of what our systems have to offer. In addition, “Tuesday Tips” will also describe steps to complete current functions that may show a long-time User a more efficient way to do business.

In some cases, former employees are rehired as current employees of a company, and therefore need to be reactivated to Active Employee status in WebCOBRA. Because it is May and the end of the academic school year is quickly approaching, plan administrators for teachers, for example, may need to convert these Active Employees into Qualified Beneficiaries in WebCOBRA, as teachers are often considered “terminated” from current employee status at the end of each academic school year (usually May or June).

Some of these teachers are then re-hired as current employees at the beginning of the next academic school year (usually August or September). WebCOBRA® currently allows a User to re-activate a non-archived former employee to Active Employee status and maintain the participant’s data throughout each status change.

We here at Travis know that this time of year is especially busy for some of our TravisFlex system users, and wanted to remind you of how to utilize some of the system functions available for Year End Processing. We also wanted to take this opportunity to inform you of a few upcoming legislative changes regarding Flexible Spending Accounts (FSAs).

Recently, the Missouri Western District Court acknowledged an employer’s effort of “good faith” compliance, evidenced by implementing a COBRA notice tracking program, which provided an ability to show documentation and proof of the mailing of correspondence. This statement further confirms the value that TravisCobra and WebCOBRA may have in a case where penalties for non-compliance with COBRA requirements are being sought.

Most COBRA issues that result in litigation are settled prior to trial, and in those cases there is no public record of a judge’s rulings. A recent COBRA-related case actually went to trial and the ruling issued by a Federal District judge confirmed that the letters generated by Travis’ systems were “precise” and “unambiguous.” The case is Ratcliff v. Psychiatric Solutions, Inc., 2010WL 2814418 (W.D. La., July 16, 2010).

For the past several months, Travis’ developers have been working on significant improvements to WebCOBRA On Demand that are now either in the final stages of development or in our Quality Assurance/Testing process. The efforts have been delayed by the repeated changes to COBRA and ARRA over the past months which have required “all hands on deck” efforts by our staff to produce releases for you very quickly.

Even with all the ARRA releases, we have made progress on programming these major new improvements. They are now scheduled to be added to WebCOBRA over the next few months, and are close enough to delivery that we wanted to tell you about them.

Customer satisfaction is a top priority for Travis Software Corp., and Travis is working hard to make sure our customers know it. One way we are trying to improve customer satisfaction is to decrease the amount of time that a customer must wait to speak with a live support representative. Due to recent improvements, Travis support is currently providing the shortest hold time ever attained. The average hold time is typically less than one (1) minute.

Starting Monday, July 20th, 2009, we have optimized the time it takes our callers to receive support using the phone! Read below for details about how calling the support queue will change on Monday.

Below is the raw holding data statistics from our support line. Since our average hold time hit our pre-ARRA numbers, we wanted to share them with you. Details below include our averages for time periods in the day and total experience breakdown. We track our experience in detailed segments, such as Hold Time between 11:30 and 12:30 on Wednesday, so you can see that as well.

The average hold time for the week of June 22 2009 through June 26, 2009 was 2:55 ... less than three minutes!

As some of you may already know, we offer an IT Resources section for all of our Supervisor-level users within the WebCOBRA.com system, but what you may not know is that the IT Resources section is not just for IT people!

The short video below will give you a general overview of everything you can find in WebCOBRA IT Resources.

One question that we have heard is, ‘Are you going to continue to support TravisCobra?’ The answer is resoundingly YES!

TravisCobra, and its DOS predecessor, has been running smoothly for 23 years and has a devoted user base. We believe in client hosted COBRA software, and we’ll be supporting it for years and years to come.

In our opinion, Travis provides the best benefit administration systems on the market, and we have consistently provided support for those products in an evolving way over Travis’ nearly 23 years in business.

In order to keep Travis Support evolving, we’re making a clarification as to what Travis Support Representatives will require in order to accept a support case that requires more investigation than one phone call can provide.

One of the major benefits of always keeping your TravisCobra system up-to-date with the latest features and fixes is that you are guaranteed to always have the latest and greatest COBRA administration features, but there’s another benefit that you may not have thought about: a faster and easier updating process!

We have seen users not update their systems because they think it will take too long or be too much of a hassle, and, in reality, the opposite is true. Every time you run a Patch on your TravisCobra data, not only do you download new features, but you also fix existing issues you may or may not be aware of. The moral of the story is, the more often you update, the less time you’ll spend upgrading.

We have finalized our plans to enable administrators to exclude the 65% government subsidy enabled by ARRA in both TravisCobra and WebCOBRA to domestic partners and other ineligible dependents.

There are a lot of questions surrounding how WebCOBRA calculates a premium whenever there are the inevitable modifications, such as mid-month coverage changes, plan drops, plan adds, etc., that occur to a QBs account. Travis Support would like to provide a few scenarios that will help you, our customers, understand what the best practice to follow would be in these situations.