Employer Customer Insight Report

You Said, We Did

The Customer Insight Project

The overarching research objectives were to:

  • Understand needs and expectations – what do customers expect from their pension provider?
  • Explore how to improve and deliver excellence – what would customers do differently or in addition to what is already on offer.
  • Set parameters for on-going monitoring – what does success look like to customers?

All the member feedback we received will be used to form our future Improved Customer Experience project. The details of which we hope you share soon.

Who was involved

The first half of the Customer Insight project involved us approaching our Employers.

We included the following types of employers:

  • 1x County Council subsidiary
  • 2x District & Borough councils
  • 3x Academies
  • 4x Private companies providing public services.

In addition, we interviewed a mix of employer sizes (by headcount/ number of members) and location – to provide reasonable coverage across the scheme's catchment area.

How the insights were collected

We conducted a 1-hour online interview over Microsoft Teams, conducted by director-level qualitative specialists using a discussion guide agreed with the Surrey Pension Team. The interviews were then recorded and auto transcribed for analysis.

What Employers Said

Employers lacked confidence in the responses they received from the Surrey Pension Team.

  • We have established an Employer Champion within our Customer Relationship Team to provide a single point of contact.
  • We have streamlined and improved the way we share internal resources to make sure that every member of the team has access to the latest accurate information quickly.

Employers wanted an acknowledgement response within 24 hours. They also wanted greater visibility of our Service Level Agreements.

  • We reviewed our automatic responses and promise to renew them with up-to-date time frames as needed.
  • We have made a commitment to making our Service Level Agreements more transparent. We will also continue to make them more prominent on our websites.
  • We will produce Employer resources with high-level check lists to help better communicate timeframes.

Employers identified our Annual General Meeting (AGM) as an opportunity for education and information dissemination.

  • For 2024 we have split our AGM into 2 sessions, to greater focus on the individual needs of our different types of Employers.
  • A digital AGM for Schools and Admitted Bodies was held on 18 October. At this meeting we received the following additional feedback:
    • 46% received the Employer Newsletters
      • The Employer Team has since sent out a contacts form to all employers to make sure that we have the correct contact details for receiving correspondences.
    • They would like to see the following improvements to the Employer website; better search functions, FAQs page and clear guidance and an optimised structure for the website.
      • We have plans to update our Employer Website to implement these findings and streamline information.
    • Main reason employers visited the Employer website was to access the range of forms
  • A session for Councils, Districts and Boroughs will be held on 8 November. We will provide feedback from this session in the following update.

Employers felt that the End of Year Communication was too complex and that they needed additional support.

  • We will make sure that our End of Year video is added to our auto-response during this period in 2025.
  • By 2025, we will have onboarded most of our Employers onto the i-Connect system. This will help to simplify the data collecting process and reduce the reliance on a single End of Year document. More information can be found on the i-Connect page of the Employer website.

Employers requested more self-service tools to reduce wait times particularly for Retirement Estimates.

  • We will be implementing the Retirement Calculator function for members on our online 'My Pension' portal. This will allow members to run retirement calculations without the input of employers.
  • In 2025, once we have completed our i-Connect rollout to all our employers, we will also explore the function that allows Employers to run estimates on the i-Connect platform.

Employers would like a leaflet with key benefits of the Scheme as a resource they can share.

  • Such a leaflet and similar resources capturing the key benefits of the Local Government Pension Scheme (LGPS) are currently in progress.
  • We have updated the Employer handbook to make processes and Employer responsibilities clearer.
  • We are currently reviewing the content on our Employer website to see how we can make our processes and requirements from Employers easier to follow.