You can lead a horse to water…increasing pension engagement

The recently published ‘Lessons on Pensions Engagement’ research from the DWP is a positive demonstration of the governments ongoing focus on increasing customer engagement with their pensions.

It contains insights and practical suggestions on how to improve engagement such as references to similar research that’s been carried out across other sectors. One example is an expert commenting in relation to the Danish Pension Dashboard, who recommends to consider that you only have 5-10 minutes max, of a customer’s time to engage – what are the key facts and messages that you can you deliver in that time?

There was a focus on communications, and recognition that they’re still too focussed on regulatory compliance and corporate perspective rather than being written from customer POV. But, with the best will in the world, you could produce excellent comms and information, ensuring that they are timely, easy to understand, targeted at the customer’s personal circumstances and made accessible via the right channels, but how are you tackling the challenge of ‘non-looking’ and getting the recipient to read it in the first place?

If the goal of increasing engagement is achieved, then so what? What benefits translate from this? You would like to hope that increased engagement at the right time would lead to positive actions to increase savings, better decision making and ultimately greater financial security for the duration of a person’s retirement. However, an interesting point that was raised was whether a causal relationship between increased engagement and an increase in positive outcomes even exists, something which the research was unable to establish to any great extent.

Any efforts to improve engagement are always likely to be more successful with those that are closer to retirement and those that have more to invest i.e. have the most interest. Therefore, to maximise benefits, focussing effort on increasing engagement with the right customer segments and demographics is key i.e. those who are younger and with less to invest, but also ensuring that that engagement translates through to positive actions and decisions as a result.