Where bribery is smiled upon: Is paying for feedback worth the effort?

Take a minute to imagine the challenge facing employers and trustees, seeking from members pointers on how the scheme can improve the way it delivers pension scheme benefits – especially given the degree of apathy in workplace pensions.

Karen Partridge, chief business development officer at communication consultancy AHC, said the best way to encourage members to take part in surveys was to offer some kind of incentive such as entering respondents into a draw to win an iPad, iPod or retail vouchers. 

“Otherwise the problem with a survey is you always run the danger [that] the only people who want to feature by doing the survey are people that have a gripe,” she said.

Providing members with an incentive can help generate responses from a wider and better-balanced proportion of the scheme’s membership.

“The biggest barrier to people completing surveys is time constraints, so if you make it so they need as little time as possible to complete it you’re more likely to get more responses to it,” Partridge said.

Formatting surveys with just a few, short questions can help with this, she said, as well as making surveys available online and prompting members to participate.

The NHS's pension comms approach 

The NHS Pension Scheme typically uses online surveys to gain member feedback, while pop-ups remind members that a survey is available for them to complete, said James Davenport, senior communication manager at NHS Business Services Authority.

For the scheme’s 2013 customer satisfaction survey of active members, the contact centre asked members who called in if they would like to take part; for the willing callers they took a contact email address, and the online survey was emailed to them with follow-up reminders.

It was also promoted via the pension home page and in the employer newsletter, and of 1,334 emails sent out 484 surveys were completed. 

This year it is adding collection methods such as a link to the survey on webpages. "We hope to achieve a sample in excess of 1,000 which would provide a +/- 3 per cent margin of error based on a 95 per cent confidence level,” said Davenport.

He added that because the scheme has around 1.5m members, its website gains enough hits each month to ensure it does not have to chase members to gain statistically viable results.

Attaching surveys to communications regarding a similar topic, such as changes to investment options for members, can also be a good way of driving participation, Partridge said.  

Davenport said the key benefit to the NHSBSA method of surveying is to gain customer insight.

“The NHSBSA believes that customer insight will help us deliver significant improvements for customers and increase customer satisfaction," said Davenport.

However Peter Askins, director at Independent Trustee Services, said he has “considerable doubts about the efficacy of surveys in general” given the legal consultation requirements schemes must abide by when making changes to anything that may affect members’ interests.

“Unless you’re open to future accrual, as the public sector [schemes are], then it’s difficult to see what the value is,” he said.