With more and more retirement plans featuring automatic enrollment, automatic increases and default investments, there is very little retirement decisionmaking left in the hands of plan participants.

As the number of employees asking their benefit adviser about which retirement strategy to use and how much to contribute to their 401(k), one wonders if the future of retirement plan advice is moving away from personal counseling toward still more automation.

Don Taylor, president of Knoxville, Tenn.-based Trendz Advisors puts a high value on automation, yet doesn't see it as a threat to his advisory firm. "Becoming a high-quality money manager isn't a preferred hobby for many [employees]," says Taylor. "Automated enrollment, automated increases and automated investment management can help overcome participants behaving badly.'"

The role of the retirement plan adviser still is important in that helping employers set up plans that lower or eliminate tough choices improves outcomes, Taylor says. Not only do automated decision-making tools help enroll more eligible employees, but automation also helps participants use DC plans more fully.

"Without automated features, you have a lot of people sitting in a plan who aren't fully utilizing it to the extent they should - either by saving enough money or by investing their assets in a more diversified way," says Kevin F. Crain, director of institutional retirement group sales and integrated benefits business with Merrill Lynch's retirement group.

However, it may take the counsel of a retirement adviser to help plan assets reach their full potential because setting up the right program with automatic features isn't enough. Many advisers and employers think automatically enrolling employees and touching their paycheck is a wake-up call for employees to realize the need to save for retirement. Instead, employees hardly notice and often complacently stay at the default contribution level, assuming that's enough.

"Once the employees are in the plan, it opens up a great opportunity for the adviser to step into the employee education part of their job. Rather than try to get someone who isn't in the plan, in the plan, the adviser can talk to people who are already in a plan and get them to start doing more," says Crain.

Thanks to automatic enrollment, advisers can offer more counsel to participants because employees currently enrolled in the plan are more receptive to advice. An automatically enrolled employee's first discussion about their 401(k) is one in which they see they already have money in the plan and that money is growing.

"The first thing they get is a statement of success because they get their quarterly statement and they realize, I have money in the plan.' As a result, more people show up to the meetings, people are more engaged and when the adviser wants to talk about how they can do more it's all real money they're talking about because they're already seeing things happen for them," says Crain. "It's increased the effectiveness of the adviser role with the client and employee communication."

Crain says it's a total shift from the days when advisers would concentrate solely on the 25% to 30% of the employee population who should be in the plan, but are not. Connecting with that group was difficult and even getting them to an enrollment meeting was a struggle. Now, employees are more interested in growing the money they already have in their 401(k). The adviser can offer more valuable advice on contribution levels, risk levels and diversification.

"Advisers are needed for help in developing passive and active models, since many participants will move away from the default model," says Taylor.

There is also a significant consultative need for advisers to help employers design or implement good auto-enroll, auto-increase and advice programs. With new products comes a new set of consultative selling to the client that the adviser can now do because these automatic features exist and they have proven to be successful.

Molly Bernhart is the managing editor of Employee Benefit Adviser, an EBN sister publication covering news and trends in the benefits broker and consultant industry.