Background
Universities Superannuation Scheme (USS) is one of the largest principal private pension schemes for universities & other higher education institution staff in the UK.
Established in 1974, USS are dedicated to providing retirement benefits to almost 460,000 members across 340 institutions in the higher education sector. Aiming to provide the highest quality pension service to their members and their employers, USS manage and administer both the pensions schemes and the majority of investments in-house.
Business Drivers
USS wanted a platform that supported their aims to increase customer self-serve and enhance customer satisfaction scores.
They needed a solution that would enable their entire digital team to provide their members with a streamlined, cohesive customer journey, enabling them to easily access their information and manage their accounts.
USS were looking to improve their customer satisfaction scores by increasing the effectiveness of their digital services, delivering an improved online experience for their members and employers and increasing customer self-serve options.
Prior to our working engagement, some of USS’ processes were paper-based, and for a customer to change their details, this required them to print off a document from the USS website, complete it by hand, and post it into the USS customer team. This analogue way of working created significant inefficiencies for USS’ customers and their in-house customer facing teams.
USS recognised that processes like these needed to be digitised and streamlined in order to improve customer experiences, reduce cost to serve and create efficiencies for their staff.
Solution
At the outset of our engagement, we worked with USS to understand their business’ vision and how digital could effectively support this. This enabled us to ensure we had clear alignment between our activities and their intended business outcomes.
USS’ new site and customer portal (My USS), built on the Sitecore DXP streamlines many of their old processes. The platform enables USS’ entire digital team to collaborate on the site. From developers through to digital marketers, Sitecore provides an easy-to-use CMS, enabling content creators to edit existing content and create new content such as blogs or landing pages efficiently, without any involvement from a developer.
The Sitecore DXP has also helped to streamline some of USS’ process, such as the previously mentioned postal-based process, which members had to follow in order to change their address.
These processes have been streamlined, creating a seamless, cohesive experience that enables members to self-serve and change their address in minutes, avoiding any analogue, paper-based processes.
Whilst rebuilding the USS website and their new customer portal (My USS), we also had to ensure that their new Sitecore platform integrated with their administrative systems so members could seamlessly amend their contact details, dependencies, expression of wish details and monthly contribution amounts, without having to login to multiple different sites and pages.
We have a wealth of experience in completing complex integrations within the Sitecore DXP, enabling professionals from within financial services, utilities and energy sectors to seamlessly sync data, configure flexible workflows and connect to administrative systems, creating in-house efficiencies and improved ways of working.
For USS, this has created a fluid customer journey that’s simple and accessible, enabling customers to access their data and make any amendments to their pension scheme with ease.
In addition to this, our in-house developers have worked with the USS digital team to create personalised experiences for USS customers visiting the new site. USS’ new Sitecore platform has the ability to display targeted, relevant content to their customers.
This enables USS to leverage Sitecore’s capabilities to personalise specific messages for different customer groups, displaying relevant messaging to relevant customers.
Outcome
Using the Sitecore DXP, we have created a rich, personalised, coherent experience for USS’ members and employers. Our design process incorporated the core values and messages of USS’ brand into the visual UI structure, utilising their brand guidelines to ensure a strong visual design.
The new Sitecore-based USS website and My USS portal have been created with the customer in mind, aiming to provide them with a cohesive, simplistic experience that enables them to carry out tasks that were previously complicated and were not providing a positive customer experience.
Overhauling previously analogue tasks and transforming them into digital experiences has created a platform where USS members can self-serve, creating efficiencies both for them and for USS’ customer facing teams.
USS’ new Sitecore platform, hosted in Microsoft Azure, is a flexible, scalable state of the art system that encompasses detailed analytics and best practice security features.
This sets USS up for a future of continuing digital innovations and enhancements that will further improve customer experiences and ensure their platform has the ability to comfortably deal with dramatic spikes in customer demand.
Since appointing Mando they have been a great digital partner – they have been true to their commitments and resolute in delivery of the programme. What they have implemented is far more than a couple of websites; they have contributed in a meaningful way to support some 460,000 USS members needs through their pensions journey.
Piers Bishop, Group Transformation Executive, USS
