Customer Servicing Statement - June

Improving services to our members

We remain committed to developing our services to increase opportunities for members to engage with their pensions savings and harness efficiencies for employers. We are focussed on reducing the delays some members have experienced in accessing their pension benefits.

To support our members in managing their pension saving and planning for retirement, we have continued to develop our online services. Since launch in July 2023, almost 78,000 members have registered for their new secure online member portal and, following release early 2024, our members have produced 45,000 pension projections using the new online pensions modelling tools.

We offer a range of opportunities for our members to engage with their pensions saving including a variety of region-wide in-person events, which 3,600 members have attended so far this year.

We have increased the capacity of the customer servicing centre, enabling us to provide increased member support and reduced waiting times. We continue to see a month-on-month increase in benefit processing output and expect this to continue over the next 2-3 months.

We continue to work in partnership with Equiniti, our Pension Administration Software supplier, to complete planned system development to further increase processing efficiencies and timeliness of delivery of benefit information to members. We are also working closely with our employers including those experiencing change, to offer support to members who may be affected or thinking more about their future working and retirement plans.

Rachel Brothwood, Executive Director commented: “We continue to receive valuable feedback from our members and employers and are pleased our regular customer updates have been well received. Our new online pension estimate tools are proving to be very popular and these play a key role in enabling us to support our members in their pension saving and planning for retirement.

Our customer servicing and benefit processing rates continue to improve, enabling us to reduce member waiting times. We recognise there is more still to do and thank our customers for their patience. I am sorry to those who have had to wait longer than expected to receive their benefit quotations and payments. We are adapting our capacity to meet increased demand for information and member services and have delivered on our commitment to continue to provide both online and face-to-face support across the region and membership base.

I would like to thank our employers for their support in ensuring timely delivery of data and resolution of queries which is enabling us to provide a better service to our members.

We are on track with our phased service recovery and will continue to ensure improvements continue to be made and benefits are realised for all.”

Further information, support and access to customer information please visit Customer Servicing Update.