UK-based companies, HGS and Engage Hub partnered with The Pensions Regulator to streamline the customer experience and allow the company to drive improvement to employees’ pension scheme management. Julie Mortlock, Head of Client Services, HGS UK, tells us more about this collaboration and the results realised.
The Pensions Regulator (TPR) is a UK regulator of workplace pension schemes. It makes sure that employers put their staff into a pension scheme and pay money into it. It also ensures that workplace pension schemes are run properly so that people can save safely for their later years.
The background
Governance surrounding customer care is a high priority for TPR and the insight behind Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) plays a big part in understanding where in the customer journey TPR can improve its service. As part of its continuous improvement strategy, TPR partnered with HGS UK to deliver a feedback platform that elegantly complements the customer journey and more importantly, provides data to improve CSAT insight.
HGS has a partnership with Engage Hub – a leader in the provision of journey orchestration and cross-channel communications – to enhance and differentiate customer experience (CX) across multiple sectors using real-time insights. Engage Hub’s tool, Customer Journey Tracker, enables HGS’ client, TPR, to drive proactive improvement to employees’ pension scheme management.
The challenges
HGS worked with TPR to investigate options for obtaining customer feedback insight and improve the survey process behind this. Traditionally, TPR has gathered customer feedback through an outbound one-to-one interview service and, typically, this action would occur on a different day than the interaction between the HGS adviser and TPR customer. HGS identified an opportunity to close this gap in feedback, meaning the survey process could be automated and available in a customer’s channel of choice.
As part of a new approach, HGS explored the benefits of an immediate and automatically triggered survey. This would allow TPR to learn more about a customer’s experience by surveying them straight after the interaction, improving the client’s recall accuracy and providing real-time insights for the contact centre team.
The innovation
Due to the company’s experience of working with some of the UK’s most recognisable brands, HGS understood that auto-triggering a survey relies on elegant channel switching. To achieve this, HGS technology teams collaborated with Engage Hub and the AWS contact centre technology, Amazon Connect, to design, test and implement a self-service process to accommodate voice and text feedback for TPR. This was named Engage Hub’s Customer Journey Tracker.
“Like many organisations that strive to continuously deliver the best possible end-user experience, we know data is king,” said Julie Mortlock, Head of Client Services, HGS UK.
“Typically, data is rarely business-line ready and human intervention is sometimes required to transform raw information into usable insight. With Engage Hub, the business-line-designed dashboard means that in an instant, someone has a snapshot of all CSAT-related interventions and overall survey sentiment. At any point of the customer journey, a user can deep-dive into the granular detail and dissect an element of feedback including the transcription of an open comment.
“The outcome of this proactive over reactive approach is the ability to pinpoint opportunities for future improvements and, in turn, build a memorable customer experience in the long term,” she added.
“At The Pensions Regulator, we are extremely proud of our contribution to the success of the rollout of workplace pensions auto-enrolment over the last ten years,” said Joe Walker, Service and Performance Manager, TPR.
“Our customer support team helps ensure employers get the guidance they need to successfully meet their legal duties. In just 2022 alone, we responded to enquiries from more than 100,000 customers. To optimise customer experience, we were keen to review how we gathered customer feedback, so explored options with HGS. Once Engage Hub’s Customer Journey Tracker had been refined to meet our requirements, it went live in June 2022. We’ve now seen the number of customer feedback surveys generated increase greatly, which has enabled us to refine our processes and so improve the customer experience.”
The results
Engage Hub’s Customer Journey Tracker has been built with the company’s own intellectual property (IP) to enable machine learning (ML) under artificial intelligence (AI). The combined power of Engage Hub’s AI and Google speech-to-text (STT) technologies enable natural language processing (NLP) to interpret the best intervention from voice utterances throughout the telephony survey. With this, STT captures open comments so that detailed context can be assessed when identifying the root cause of any issues.
“We’re delighted that our work with The Pensions Regulator has enabled it to seamlesslygather feedback from more customers than ever. Our partnership has subsequently led to faster resolutions for existing queries and all the while harnessed the data to power an improved customer experience,” added Mortlock.
While the Customer Journey Tracker acts as the orchestrator, the big benefit has been real-time data from across all touchpoints and channels. The visual dashboard makes the most of all survey interactions in one, unified view.
“Its success has largely been powered by some of our existing partnerships and the subsequent technology that we are able to support The Pensions Regulator with,” concluded Mortlock. “Through AI-supported natural language processing, technology and data has been the driving force in the development of customer experience and enabled complex customer feedback to be interpreted and processed in record time.”