What you need to know

• Mercer Super is undertaking a three-year project to uplift the digital experience for Mercer Super's members, customers, and advisors.
• The goal is to improve customer satisfaction, and customer effort scores while driving cost out of the business.
• That should lead to improvements in NPS (which is languishing for the current app).
• First up, a new mobile app that will tackle a range of pain points such as the login experience and other general issues such as fees and performance which are big drivers of calls to the call centre. Early next year advisors will get a new desktop app, and throughout the project, new capabilities will be delivered to customers.
• To help smooth the business transformation, there is also an organisational change with Nicole Mathias Browne promoted to chief customer officer and CX and marketing merged into a single group.

Mercer Super has commenced a  three year project to uplift the digital experience for customers, employers advisors partners. The merger of BT Super and Mercer Super last year created a fund that at the time of the deal had about 850,000 members, making it one of the 15 largest funds in Australia with $63bn total assets under management.

Work has begun, with the initial focus on redesigning the data architecture, which the first deliverables for members are expected in the September quarter this year in the form of a new smartphone app, followed by a new desktop app for planners.

According to chief customer officer Nicole Mathias-Browne who experienced her own professional uplift from CMO to CCO last month, “Members money won't be used to build this”. Instead, the funding is an artefact of the BT Super and Mercer Super merger from a year ago. As such, the work is being treated as part of the cost of integration.

Despite the overhaul, the base martech stack is unlikely to change radically with Mathias-Browne describing the current approach as solid.

She tells Mi3 Australia, “The focus is very much on how do we give members the best experience to — and then throughout — retirement. That's one of the pillars of our strategy. Mercer Super’s strategy is very much around delivering growth through multi-channel experiences. But one of the key ones is delivering exceptional experiences. It’s very much a cultural thing we tend to stand behind.”

Mathias-Browne says: "There are three factors in super that determine whether you win or lose members by: Fees, performance, and your brand, which is your experience.”

“Fees and performance are very much around perception. But the third part – experience -that is the reality. If you have a bad experience, that is your reality.”

None of the super funds have got this right yet she says, and she includes Mercer in that observation. 

Currently, she suggests, “Our is solid but it's not amazing.”

That’s why the new member app release slated for the September quarter is not delivering new functionality, but rather its focused on dramatically improving the customer experience in the context of the current capabilities.

According to Mathias-Browne, Mercer Super has identified key five pain points – such as customer login – that it will address. Once this is delivered the focus switches to tools for the planners. And then in the later phase of the project, new capabilities will be brought on stream.

“It’s almost this two-speed thing delivery plus a plan. The other option that we considered was doing everything whiz-bang, from the start, but it was just going to end up taking like 12 to 18 months and we don’t have the time.”

Once the new app and the advisor portal are delivered, the third phase will start to deliver new functionality.

“The biggest thing we find with Super in Australia is people often say, help give me confidence, help me know what I'm doing.”

“So the big focus for next year will be personalisation. Currently, from a marketing perspective, when we interact with members, we have very limited channels, it's really only by email and text, and text message are a bit on the nose, particularly with money. So this one will really be looking at personalised help, guidance, and projections via the app. As of June our member lifecycle journeys will be automated, so from go to woe including retirement.”

“Those will still exist but we will start to use the app.” 

Measuring success

Currently, Mercer measures net promoter score for the existing app, and Mathias-Browne acknowledges the NPS is very low.

“We don’t just want to get to benchmark, we want to get to above benchmark. So we'll look at NPS but we will also look at retention, and also cost out – have we managed to save cost in admin and operations.

Mathias-Browne says the team expects to have meaningful data it can act upon, by the end of this year. 

Further down the track, she says it's possible the company will move away from NPS for the app and go more towards customer satisfaction and customer effort scores, because, she says, people are more reticent to make recommendations when it comes to managing money. 

Business transformation

The importance of organisational and process change has become apparent, she says.

“This is probably true of other technology uplifts but more and more we're uncovering this is not just a technology project, it is actually a business improvement and business transformation project. Because once you touch one thing, or build something new on the app, [you discover] it was probably being done manually in the back end by a team or with spreadsheets. So how do we make sure that doesn't break when we move it into the app?”

The ensure its teams are aligned behind the goals of the transformation, marketing and customer experience underwent a small but important organisational change, and Mathias-Browne role morphed from chief marketing officer into chief customer officer.

“Last year, we brought together analytics, digital customer marketing which includes member marketing and advisor marketing, education, and customer experience together under the customer and growth function. 

“That was really around bringing the customer experience function into marketing. It’s really not just about marketing now, it's about the whole of the customer so we are the customer office in many ways. And so the team is called customer and growth. And just so you know, that when, when in Mercer, we refer to customer, that includes members, employers and advisors.”

Per Mathias-Browne, “To be fair, the marketing team and that customer member experience team worked so closely together that it was almost like a hybrid team anyway.”

That made for a very smooth transition, she says.