Blast from the past - celebrating success

Rummaging through my old Evernote account I found the notes for a talk I gave circa 2016 to the wider banking group owners of a pension company (semi-anonymised here as ‘Big Pension Company’). The new product I led design for not only launched and won some awards, but really moved metrics in the business and with customers.

Sadly, I don't have the slides any more for visual cues.

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Hi, I'm Mirren, creative lead for the Employer stream at Big Pension Company (BPC), the amazingly interesting corporate pensions project that we're working on up in Edinburgh.

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Some of you will have seen presentations from the Employee stream, which is all about eliciting engagement from consumers, trying to get them to pay more attention to their pensions. The employer stream for the past year has been about replacing services that our users are required to interact with, but that really weren't working for the business or the customer.

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I'm going to give you a bit of background about why we're doing what we're doing, I'll talk about the problems and the opportunities that we have, and I'll give you a quick view of the digital solution we've developed so far.

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Corporate customers are required to pay their pension contributions to BPC every month and tell us who to apply those payments to. Most of them will have direct debits set up for their bank accounts, but some still pay by BACS or even cheque.

?As well as giving us money and applying it to policies, employers also need to tell us when they have new people joining their scheme and when they have people leaving it, for a variety of reasons.?

Medium to large schemes often need to perform year-end reporting, but up to now we've only provided management information to our largest schemes, who are personally supported by relationship managers. Frankly, most of our schemes, which are the medium to small ones, haven't had access to a lot of analysis or guidance and support.

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Those customers who aren’t yet on our new ‘hub’ are interacting with us about their contributions in a variety of ways, from uploading files to two different systems to simply emailing us. When they email us, it can take the form of anything from a neat spreadsheet to drawings of cats.?

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Just emailing us whatever they want seems a lot more convenient for customers, but actually the upshot is that they end up spending a lot of time? backing and forthing with the customer service people at BPC, and then the accuracy rate of applying the right contribution amount to the right person is shocking.

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But then the two existing digital systems are clunky, inconvenient, and customers perceive them to take too much time.

This is the homepage of CPSP -- Corporate Pensions something or other -- which you can see is cluttered and not very friendly or modern looking. One of our biggest customers?used to spend up to three days a month uploading contributions.

The first purpose of the project was to overhaul the existing ways of interacting with our customers. We've done that by

1. creating a prototype customer service team that sits in the lab with us -- a non-digital pilot of people who are trained to make phone calls a one-stop experience. That's huge for BPC.
2. creating a new self-service digital interface that allows customers to submit their monthly contributions and tell us what's happening with their members all in one place that is hopefully much more user-friendly and convenient than what's gone before

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Problems

Legacy technology: our underpinning database is OLD

Siloed customer service teams in BAU

Dirty data. We have a cleaning team, but they’re constantly behind.

Huge variation in size of companies who we deal with = we have to either provide one-size-fits-all or customise interface

New schemes due to relatively new legislation about requiring companies to provide pensions = payroll/pension administrators who don’t necessarily know what they need to do

drag and drop — much preferred by able-bodied customers, but a problem for disabled ones. Wider banking group starting to get really interested in accessibility

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Opportunities

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Make the whole process as painless as possible for customers and BPC

Change the way our customer service teams work — Our model office is a set of customer service people who sit in the lab with us who've been trained to work as a one-stop shop, so instead of passing customers around from department to department, they can usually take care of any inquiry. I know this doesn't sound like rocket science, but any of you who've been involved with large old enterprises will know the issues here.

The other fantastic thing about having these service teams sitting right next to us is that they are incredibly in touch with customer needs and reactions, so for research and guerilla user-testing purposes it's so convenient.

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Teach administrators about what they need to do. I mentioned in the Problems slide that there are a lot of new schemes out there, many of them with administrators who don't necessarily know what they're doing. And dealing with their pension scheme might be a small part of their job that they only do once a month. We've heard a lot of customers asking for guidance, and people saying that they trust the pension companies to tell them what to do more than they trust HMRC. I don't know why that is, but I've heard it quite a bit!

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I don't really know why financial advisors are doing less with pensions these days -- it seems to be a less profitable arena for them now -- but there now seems to be more of an opportunity to interact with the individual members more -- get them to contribute more, consolidate their pension pots, possibly cross-sell to them.

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So, without further ado, I'll show you a glimpse of the app that's out in the wild. I won't bore you with all our screens....

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Login

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Homepage --?

Compare this to the blue screen I just showed you. We've tried to really simplify the interface, focusing on the tasks that a payroll administrator has to do. It's worth noting that eventually we're looking at customising the interface depending on what your role is. So the Finance Director of a big company, or a financial advisor is unlikely to be uploading monthly contributions, but will want to go in to look at management insights. We'll have to see whether it's appropriate for the interface to change depending on who you are.

We also have an issue here in that bigger companies will want to upload a spreadsheet that they output from their payroll software, but a lot of smaller companies would find it easier to manually enter their contributions or just push a button to say 'same as last month'. So we're trying to design for a wide variety of behaviours.

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Matching -- accessibility issues

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Joiners

There's a lot of paperwork associated with people joining a pension scheme.?

We do have a journey for adding new members that lives outside this contribution upload process, which is being well-used, but one of our issues is that we don't have a good enough onboarding process at the moment, so people don't know what to expect?

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I like to call this one the 'dead people' page. You wouldn't know it, but this page is a big wow factor for people we've tested it on. Basically, if you've told us that someone has died, then you try to put through a pension payment for them anyway, we go 'hey stupid, you told us this person's dead. Stop paying them.' Apparently this saves a huge amount of bureaucratic hassle.

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Review & Confirm

This is the last screen in the upload process. It's a chance to see what you've done and make sure it's right. We know that a lot of our bigger customers like to split the roles between someone who does the upload work and someone who authorises the payment, so we will soon have the ability to split roles: the person who only has upload capability will get to this page, then hit a button that says 'send to authoriser', The authoriser will receive a link that takes them directly here.

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Users

Here's where we've run afoul of big enterprise IT security.

No matter how nice we try to make this digital experience, the flow is unwieldy. In order to create a new user, you enter a bunch of details about them -- which is great for BPC, as up until recently they knew next to nothing about their users, including no contact information. You send them an invitation that contains their username and the first part of a temporary password, then you have to somehow tell them the second half.

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Notifications

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Userzoom - 130 responses about what people might want to be notified about. The vast majority want to be reminded that it's time to submit their monthly payment. They want to be emailed about it, as they don't log in to the app all the time. We're trying to figure out if there are any other things people would find it interesting or useful to know, and what the best mechanism of getting it to them is.

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MI

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This is another set of functionality we've been working on.

What is is

Another screen with scheme and fund performance

radical departure for BPC --?Frankly, it sort of steps on the toes of certain financial advisors. We've been told that big employers can be charged 10 grand for some fairly rudimentary analysis of their scheme health, and we're proposing to just give it to all our customers. So this is an interesting business decision BPC is taking. It seems like they're taking a bet that in the future financial advisors aren't going to be nearly as important for gaining new business as they currently are, so they don't mind pissing them off.

One of the design challenges for us with this suite is that its importance differs greatly depending on scheme size. For big companies, they're really interested in the ability to analyse their membership by gender and age, to see how much of their workforce is on track for retirement, and see how the benefits they offer compare to industry benchmarks. Smaller schemes... not so much -- and we run into issues with anonymity under a certain number of people.

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So, how have we done so far?

We opened our beta only about 6 weeks after starting the project early last year, but we went live for real in December. Since then we've gotten 942 employers onto the new hub and processed nearly 39 million pounds worth of contributions. On top of that, we send out a Userzoom survey to each employer after they use the system for the first time, and the feedback has been phenomenal. Obviously there are people having issues with it, and there are one or two spoilsports who don't like the look of it, but in general customers are really excited about it.

I'll leave you with a success story: One of BPC’s biggest customers asked to join the hub because they found CPSP extremely clunky -- in some months they were spending up to three days to finish their upload -- and the first they used the hub it took them one hour. We expect that next month it will only take them 20 minutes.

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