Peer Intelligence | Fall 2022

By Hannah Blomfield

I had an interesting conversation with a Pensions Manager the other day. He informed me that they don’t gather feedback from members of their pension fund; they’re worried about the responses. Initially I was surprised. As our discussion progressed, I began to understand why the “head in the sand” approach was currently being taken: severe resource issues. Does this sound familiar?

Many pensions organisations seem to be experiencing problems with recruiting and retaining staff now, and this is particularly acute within certain areas of the UK pensions sector. This doesn’t have to stop you from providing good service to your members though.

I recently caught up with a few UK pension funds to understand some of the unexpected benefits they’ve found using CEM’s Voice of the Customer (VoC) peer comparison service so far and the ease of implementing the Framework.

We found that the maturity and complexity of customer feedback programmes can vary considerably. For pension funds with newer, less well-established programmes, they said that the Framework provided focus, whilst for more mature ones, it gave the incentive to re-evaluate their programmes’ effectiveness. When was the last time you assessed the success of your feedback programme?

Response rates are always high on the list when thinking about feedback programmes and is something that will be discussed many times during our VoC forums. One pension fund took advantage of the Framework implementation and updated their post-retirement survey to only include two questions in the hope that less effort to provide feedback would result in higher response rates. Another fund was pleased to see that our VoC dashboard indicates where small sample sizes have been submitted, helping to answer the question “is it me, or is it a struggle to get feedback from members who’ve recently retired/used our website/joined?”. With our VoC subscription, funds of all shapes and sizes can leverage the member insights that matter most to them.

In the next edition, you’ll hear directly from some of the VoC participants, but if you would like to know more now, please reach out to us or read more about the Framework.