Customer Engagement & Retirement Planning

The customer need for retirement guidance and support amongst the Gen X cohort (now aged 44 - 59) is very clear following excellent research by Standard Life (Retirement Voice 2023) and yet the same research shows little action is being taken by Gen X:

• Only 35% are confident they know their pension savings options & only 36% know how they will access retirement finances
• Only 29% think they are saving enough for retirement & 62% are worried their savings won’t last
• Only 21% have done a great deal of planning for retirement

This research concludes that “Increasing the provision of free financial education and guidance – and making it personal, relatable and engaging” is critical to ensuring better financial and social wellbeing for all.

At Life Moments, we create propositions that help our clients achieve this. For example, we created Homebuyer Hub with Standard Life, which is deployed within their workplace savings app and has helped increase engagement with the youngest cohorts.

But how can we ensure engagement with Gen X who need to take retirement action now?

According to recent Pensions Policy Institute research, “What could effective pensions engagement look like?”? current engagement levels are low or very low for 51% of the target population but there are some simple ideas to help ensure better engagement:

• The customer should have a clear path of the steps they need to take so they are not overwhelmed and so they can gain satisfaction as they tick things off the checklist
• They should receive support when appropriate
• Segmentation should be used to personalise the journey to make it relatable
• Related to all of this, life events or stages should be used such as pre-, at- or in-retirement. This is what we do at Life Moments

We’ve added a few more ideas picked up from our research:

• Communications should be simple, jargon free, timely, in bite size pieces and in the format preferred by the customer to make them easy to consume
• Customers need rewarding for their efforts (they see retirement tools as high effort however much we simplify things) through good, early value exchange and/or gamification?
• We should play to the customer agenda by?looking at all assets held by them,?helping them with non financial lifestyle planning, and?providing support post retirement and not just pre retirement

Please let me know if you would like a Retirement Coach demo and to learn more about our customer research.

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