Heywood
To celebrate our incredible journey over the past fifty years, we are sharing stories that reflect on our heritage, long-standing relationships and the impact we’ve made. This video interview features Tom Lewis, Head of Pensions - Customer Operations at Surrey Pension Fund.
Surrey Pension Fund has spent the past few years transforming how it serves its 133,000 members, and is now entering into a new phase that puts customer experience at the heart of every decision.
In this conversation, Tom Jones, Heywood Customer Relationship Manager, speaks to Tom Lewis, who reflects on Surrey's journey and explains how a collaborative partnership with Heywood is shaping their long-term strategy.
Watch the full video or read the transcript to learn how Surrey is redefining what modern LGPS administration can look like.
You’ve been a customer for around 20 years now. Could you give us a bit of an overview about the fund and what you’ve got planned over the next 12 to 18 months?
We’ve got 133,000 members with somewhere in the region of just over 500 employers, and the fund is currently valued at around £6 billion at the moment.
We’re paying somewhere in the region of about 34,000 pensioners each month. We used to operate as a multi-administration setup, but in the last three or four years, we’ve moved to our single fund and have been in a transformation period.
We’ve been on quite a journey, really, to make that transition and transformation, and we’ve set ourselves a very clear vision to provide our customers with a better tomorrow. We’ve spent a lot of time with our staff and our customers trying to embed that new culture and that new way of working, and we’ve come to a junction now where it’s time for that strategy to evolve.
I think we are now at a point where we need to think about what that looks like, and for us, it’s all about elevating the customer. It’s all about how we put them first and make sure that we can drive those improvements for their needs.
As you said, we’ve been a customer of yours for quite some time now, and we’ve adopted many of the products that you’ve had over the years. We’ve taken the Payroll and i-Connect, Altair Insights, and they’ve been a key factor in the success that we’ve had in that time.
But now we’re at that stage where we really want, over the next 12 to 18 months, to consider taking that to the next level from a digital perspective, and see where we can go and provide more digital operations that will lean into our customers receiving an excellent service.
You’ve mentioned elevation. I’d be interested to know what that means for both yourselves as an administration function and also for the members as well.
We are talking about making sure that we put the customer front and centre of everything we do, and it’s about having that relentless focus on ensuring that what we are doing is right for them.
We want to be able to make meaningful change, and the only way we can really do that is by listening to our customers and making sure that what we adopt, what we change, and what we implement is actually something that they’re looking for.
So whether that’s calculating a benefit, investing responsibly, managing the accounts, or as simple as answering a customer query, we want to make sure that everything we do is customer-centric and that we can see that the changes, the improvements and the work that we are doing have added value for them.
Are there some key products that you’re planning to use to embed that strategy more widely?
Yeah, certainly. So I think one that we’ve had in for a while is i-Connect, which is becoming more and more of a one-stop shop for our employers to use as a portal. It’s predominantly been used for the purposes of us being able to receive those monthly data contributions and member information, but we see that moving forward to adopt some more of that functionality where our employers can utilise that and actually start to self-serve.
Something that’s really important for us as we explore what the customer wants is whether there are more self-service requirements they’re looking for.
I think the other one that’s playing a real key role, and we see a lot of potential in, is Heywood Engage. We are just in the midst of rolling that out now and implementing that, but some of the opportunities that offers around having full automation processes from end to end and digitised forms mean there are some great opportunities to exploit some of that online functionality.
A great example of that we’ve had over the last six to nine months is online retirements. We adopted that some time ago, and we made sure that we provided a lot of communications and guidance around that so that we could ensure it got the right traction with our customers.
The big win that we’ve seen is that we are now finding that over 75% of our retirements are being initiated online, and we’ve had significant reductions in the time it takes to process those cases. So, ultimately, the quicker that we can do that work, and the more accurately we can do that work, our customers who are taking their benefit at a really important time can start to feel the benefits of that in their personal lives.
How quickly have you managed to get those retirement backlogs down, from kicking off the online retirement to the member getting their pension?
The last time we looked at it, in the last quarter, we’ve seen from our traditional route the process for offering a member an estimate would take somewhere in the region of 11 or 12 days. When a member initiates it themselves online, that’s looking more like one to two days. So the time savings, both for us in terms of operations, but most importantly the speed at which the member is now able to get that quote, which will effectively turn into a payment in due course, is significant.
How has your relationship with Heywood evolved over the years that you’ve been a customer, both as a customer, and also touching on your involvement with the CLASS management team as well?
So, when I first joined Surrey Pension Fund, which I think is around six years ago, the relationship we had with Heywood then I felt was very much a traditional relationship. It was very much a client–customer relationship and felt quite transactional at times. I think over the last three or four years, there’s been an obvious shift from Heywood about putting an emphasis on their clients and understanding their needs.
So there’s a much more collaborative feel than there has been before. I think the customer relationship team managers who are assigned to each of us as funds have grown and shown the need to really get under the hood of what we do, because ultimately that helps influence the direction of travel we want to go, the direction of travel that Heywood wants to go, and ideally helps align those strategic opportunities that we’re looking for.
So I think there’s certainly been a change in tack there, which I feel has benefited us as an individual fund, and I think you’ll probably find other funds feel the same in the care and attention they now get.
I think, specifically, when we turn to the CLASS, it’s a very unique setup. There’s representation from different LGPS funds, and there are some brilliant people on there who really know their stuff. The unique part about it is that it gives us a chance to collaborate with Heywood and other funds, and represent the funds that use the system, to really look at what is required and what changes are needed to that system. Is it compliance, and is there some need to make changes to it related to regulation, or is there a customer-centric focus?
Are there opportunities where customer relationship management systems could be formed and developed? It’s a really unique place, but it’s the blend of that CLASS group, coupled with the change of focus in terms of wanting to understand the fund’s requirements and needs. From our perspective at Surrey Pension Fund, it has shown there’s a much clearer strategic alignment between the two organisations.
We’ve spoken about your mission statement and putting the member at the forefront of everything that you do. What are you most excited about in the long term for Surrey and the Heywood partnership?
If I take a little step back on what it is at Surrey that really excites me, we’ve just reached that staging post in our strategy where we’ve evolved our structure, and that structure’s been changed to meet the current and future challenges that the LGPS industry offers.
The thing that really excites me the most is how we now get to engage with our customers even more than we are. I’m really excited and passionate about being able to get out there and be more interactive and more face-to-face with our customers. It’s really important we get to speak to our members and understand what it is that they want.
I think there’s an opportunity to challenge the traditional KPIs within the LGPS that allows us to put the customer at the front of everything and really understand what they want, and utilise the experience from both sides of the coin.
Yes, definitely. And just to finish off, if you had to describe the Heywood and Surrey partnership in one sentence, what would it be?
I think the partnership is one that’s built on collaboration and transparency, and on utilising the shared values that we have to put the customer at the heart of everything we do.
Thank you to Tom Lewis for his time. You can find out more about the Surrey Pension Fund by visiting their website or by following them on LinkedIn.
