Rethinking the Digital Experience to Drive Plan Participation

Plan sponsors must keep up with the ever-changing rules and regulations regarding keeping their participants informed. However, increasing participation rates is vital to your retirement plan. Although you may not have given much thought to the way your employees interact with your retirement plan’s web portal, user experience has a significant impact on participant engagement. The good news is that a full-featured, responsive website for your plan likely will engage and excite your employees, and thus promote participation rates. Move forward from archaic paper forms and encourage the use of technology for efficiency and safety to drive plan participation.

Presenting content in a user-friendly manner encourages employees to enroll and take an active role in managing their accounts. A well-designed user experience empowers plan participants to better understand their options, actively direct their funds and, ultimately, save more. Here are some insights we’ve gathered through our work with plan sponsors and plan providers on how to improve the user experience in retirement account web portals.

Easy Onboarding

The first step in making this experience more engaging is creating a smooth, simple onboarding process. New employees have many hurdles to jump over, and a cumbersome 401(k) / 403(b) enrollment process can just seem like yet another burden. User-centered design group EY Interactive investigated this question when studying the retirement industry and discovered that “making the onboarding process simple and smart can do wonders.” Reducing the amount of information requested and the number of decisions that must be made during onboarding can significantly increase employees’ participation in your retirement plan program.

Informative Dashboard

Once employees have become participants, it is critical to provide them with an informative dashboard and an equally simple and streamlined overview of their portfolio.  When plan participants log in, they want to see information that helps them evaluate their retirement readiness. The way data is displayed can influence a participant’s perception of their savings. The three resources to keep in mind when delivering this snapshot to your participants are colors, graphics and data. Synthesizing those visual cues can present the data in ways that instantly give participants the information they need to make decisions.

Comprehensive Plan Portal

Increasing plan participation goes even further than just an easy-to-use interface with colorful graphs and charts. In their study, “Insights and Implications for the Digital Retirement Experience,” the Bentley University User Experience Center notes, “More often than not, consumers struggle online because the digital retirement experience does not provide what is truly needed.” The study identified the following areas as the top barriers to digital tools’ use in driving up participant engagement:

• Language and terminology: Toning down the use of financial jargon and providing examples and/or comparisons, if possible, to illustrate the words in question, makes the environment more engaging. When it is necessary to use potentially confusing terms like rollover, transfer and cash contribution, they should be defined and put in context for users. You may also provide a resource for researching technical terms.
• Setting expectations: Make sure your participants know what to expect when they begin saving and keep them informed as they progress through any process. Let them know what result to expect when their task is complete. If possible and secure, provide a means for them to save their progress and return to finish at a later time.
• Calculator results: Explain why any calculators included on the site arrive at the results your participant receives. If calculations involve unseen factors such as life expectancy or inflation, explain how those factors are calculated and factored.
• Customer experience: Where feasible, implement services like chat and texting for contacting advisors and/or customer support. Allow users to save partial transactions and/or applications to come back to, or send to an advisor for completion or walk-through over the phone or in the office. Finally, provide easy access to all forms (e.g., spousal waiver) and make it clear up front what additional forms and information (e.g., spouse’s Social Security number) will be required in order to complete each process in which the participant engages.

Fully Responsive

Finally, the increasing reliance on mobile devices provides major leverage for driving up your employees’ engagement with your plan, if you can provide a responsive user experience. “Mobile accessibility has become a crucial component of the overall… participant digital experience, and our survey data show that engagement with plan[s] via mobile channels is on the rise,” Corporate Insight recently reported.

Getting Guidance from the Experts

Digital technology can be an asset in revitalizing participation rates. As with any tool, though, it is all in the flexibility and usability that will improve the participant experience. As an innovative consultant for retirement plans, PlanPILOT specializes in helping plan sponsors and their enrollees achieve better outcomes. Give us a call at (312) 973-4911 or email info@planpilot.com to find out how we can partner with you to increase participant engagement.

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