Targeted communication: how technology can help focus pension messages

Technology can help us overcome one of the main challenges in engaging people with pensions, namely achieving cut through when people already receive huge volumes of information every day.

Experience and research show that simply creating more communication won’t necessarily help increase engagement and drive better outcomes. This is because more awareness by itself doesn’t lead to a change in behaviour. As the Nobel Prize winning economist and psychologist, Herbert Smith said, ‘a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention’.

There’s so much information available today, with the use of the internet, mobiles and smart devices. So, we need to get pension communications to stand out and cut through the noise of life.

Technology can help us with this challenge by providing us with the ability to create more focused and targeted communications, specific to a member at a particular point in their life. It can also help us develop more engaging ways of communicating with people. At Nest, we’ve been trialling using personalised video messages to encourage people to login to their accounts for the first time, and we’ve seen a substantial uplift in activations compared to our control group.

We think that investment in technology, both now and in the future, is essential to enable deeper personalisation of pension communications to help drive better member outcomes.

Using data effectively
It’s worth considering what the purpose of member communication is, for us at Nest, it’s about ensuring our members, think(for example, that its normal to save), feel(for example, I trust my pension provider), doa specific action (for example pay an additional contribution).

We’ve seen a huge rise in the use of technology in the financial services sector in recent years, but it’s fair to say that pension providers have somewhat lagged this trend. We are seeing that change now, with the use of technology such as APIs allowing data to be quickly and securely transferred. This has allowed information about pensions to be displayed on other financial services apps people may be using, such as banking apps. These kinds of developments bring pensions in line with other savings and investments and could help people feel ownership of their pension pot, rather than it being separate from the rest of their financial dealings.

For us at Nest, with over 8 million members, engaging with them remains a key focus, especially given that many of them will have been automatically enrolled and may not even be aware they’re saving in a pension.

The savings sector, technology and customer expectations have evolved significantly over the past decade. Using data effectively to communicate and engage with members will be a focus for us through harnessing technology. The ultimate goal is to personalise the timing, content and call to action for each member.

Impact of better communications
Ultimately, the purpose of better targeted messaging is to drive better member outcomes. Are people able to retire with dignity and with enough money to last them through the rest of their life? Thanks to automatic enrolment we now have over 10million people saving in a pension, many of them saving for the first time. It’s now time to think about how we engage people with those savings over the course of their working lives and help them understand how much they need for when they retire. It’s about saving the right amount and converting these savings to a lifelong income stream.

However, we have more to do. The pensions industry needs to think about how we start to change peoples’ relationships with their workplace pension, for them to trust it and think of it as their money, in the same way as other savings they may have. To get to this stage, we need to engage with people throughout their savings journey to firstly help them understand what they need to save and secondly to help them achieve that goal. Technology is fundamental to being able to do this at scale, talking to people in a way that’s timely, personal and compelling to cut through all the other information they are bombarded with every day.

The author is Mark Rowlands, Director of Customer Engagement at Nest.

This article is provided by Nest.