Colonial First State – Helping Australians build financial resilience

For years, retail super funds supported a small, niche group of expert users - financial advisors, who acted as intermediaries, translating a complex product landscape to customers. The rapid growth of industry funds, selling direct to customers (vs advisers), and the shift in adviser business model to only service high net worth customers left traditional retail super funds & customers in a bind. To compete in this new landscape and respond to the insight that customers had a gap in servicing needs, the business needed to find sustainable solutions to update a traditional support model & address new customer expectations around online capabilities

Starting with a new vision anchored in financial wellbeing, prioritising new customer outcomes - visibility, understanding, access & confidence. To deliver this vision we shifted to a broader business service strategy focused on 100% of members completing key tasks digitally (e.g. access, see, consolidate, manage and take it with me). Solutions resolved customer pain points digitally around these “fundamentals”, while improving capacity for call centres to support more complex customer requests. Key concepts that underpinned this solution include: 1. Providing support in-context 2. Show customers what can be done 3. Frame pathways with common, but urgent questions 4. Answer once, clearly

This strategy delivers better financial wellbeing outcomes for customers: The ability to self-serve fundamental financial tasks reduces customer financial anxiety, builds confidence and improves financial resiliency By improving accessibility and flexibility of support content, customers gain visibility of their finances and can better understand their super Additionally, this strategy provided commercial uplift: Improved customer satisfaction with a cohesive and integrated service experience Increased capacity to manage all customers and their differing needs at scale. Reduced operational costs around call volumes and duration Facilitate cost transformation by supporting online conversion of member tasks and sales. Reduced content governance risks and costs

This strategy has created tangible change for customers of Australia’s second-largest provider of pensions. By taking a customer-first approach quick wins which have lasting value for both business and customer were created and put live. These include: A design system was created that aligned the look, feel and language across all digital touchpoints, enabling customers to have consistent experiences across all digital touchpoints. An updated information architecture. Enabling better customer experience, improving the navigation of digital properties as well as consistency for groupings of specific content types. How to Guides were made accessible on the public site, providing clear expectation of process, time requirement & documentation to complete fundamental tasks in managing their financial products. E.g. updating account details, consolidating superannuation accounts, nominating beneficiaries. How to Guides enabled customers to self-triage to appropriate channels. Access to support online was placed in the context of critical actions which have assumed high emotional significance, for example accessing super due to financial hardship. A content assessment framework allowed internal teams to assess and validate the use of existing content against newly created guides, ensuring users receive one answer for a single question asked regardless of the channel they ask it on.