Make it personal: Qantas's key to engagement success

Engagement is coming into sharper focus for schemes as they seek to educate workers about the benefits of pension saving, as well as inform them of the impending changes coming into play from April.

Jane Perry, chief executive of Qantas Super, a superannuation scheme for the Australian airline, told delegates at the National Association of Pension Funds’ Investment Conference on Thursday that segmenting the membership and relating the message to those groups is the best way to reach them in time.

“For us, the key to success has been making it personal,” she said. “The biggest barrier is getting to people before they need help. We don’t have anyone who, without thought or planning, could head into retirement.”

Perry said the fund used member interest – in particular its employees’ love of travel – to target communications that would drive firm actions.

“One of our most successful campaigns was where we needed to deal with an unintended consequence of a regulatory change,” she said. “We needed to get people to make an active choice to avoid a situation that would have been detrimental to them.”

The superannuation fund decided the best method would be to run a competition among members, with a prize of four business-class return flights.

“We had 24 per cent take-up on this competition,” Perry said. “The equivalent on anything like that in Australia is about 6 per cent.”

Consumer analytics

Robin Hames, head of marketing and research at Capita Employee Benefits, said making messages relevant and personal is a device advertisers have long espoused when building their campaigns.

Hames said a more robust strategy can be achieved through the use of consumer analytics.

“If we start to consider members to be consumers of pension benefits, use the data we hold to build a picture of different groups within the membership, we can then start to use technology to cost-effectively engage them in a much more personalised, relevant dialogue,” he said.

We needed to get people to make an active choice to avoid a situation that would have been detrimental to them

Jane Perry, Qantas Super

Benjie Fraser, managing director and global pensions executive at JPMorgan, speaking at the conference, said many countries shared the UK’s challenges around educating people about their pensions.

He said Malaysia and Singapore have faced similar issues around lack of interest and low financial literacy.

Fraser pointed to approaches used in Malaysia that are similar to the UK, such as use of social media, as well as those that are different, such as kiosks where people can print out statements.

“In those countries they have approached member engagement at a country level,” he said. “They are talking about building national consensus in Malaysia, raising public awareness.”

Perry stressed the benefits if such countries, including the UK, can get member engagement right.

“We’re the fourth-largest wealth-management market in the world,” she said. “We’re not the fourth-largest by population, by any stretch of the imagination, and that’s the superannuation industry that’s done that.”