Meet the team: Steve Golden and the member experience
Steve Golden, Head of Policy, Proposition and Stakeholder Engagement, talks to us about the Member Experience (MX) project. MX is a cross departmental initiative at USS focussed on delivering the best service for members at all points in their USS journey.
You’re here to talk to us about the member experience project … Before you do that can you outline your role for us?
I’ve been at USS for over 19 years now (20-year anniversary in June!) starting in operations and then working through various policy roles before landing in my current role.
We have three main streams which I’m responsible for:
The Proposition Team (which is the MX team) is responsible for the development of new, and the enhancement of current, scheme products and services. The work is critically focused on delivering and enhancing the end to end member experience.
The Technical Policy Team’s work ranges from supporting colleagues with detailed scheme questions to the development of policies reflecting statutory, legal and operational requirements.
Our Stakeholder Engagement team looks to engage with scheme stakeholders (traditionally UCU and UUK, but the scope is wider) to ensure we understand how broader issues in the HE sector will impact USS.
Member experience, or MX, is a fairly new initiative for USS. Can you out outline it’s purpose and goals for us?
Its sounds obvious…but…the scheme changed dramatically with the introduction of the hybrid design. Gone are the days of working in academia and picking up your pension at the end, you now have lots of decisions to make about your benefits throughout your membership, and most members don’t realise they should be thinking about them.
USS has always delivered excellent service to members, we’d describe it as one of our USP’s I’m sure, but we now need to expand our support and in particular help members make informed decisions throughout their journey with us. This is where MX fits in and to focus on what is required –by looking through the eyes of a member to make sure that we’re giving them what they need.
Because it’s focussing on the whole ‘member journey’ it’s a cross departmental project, can you tell us who is involved and what they’re bringing to the project?
Most of the departments in the business are represented within the work of the wider MX team which is led by Lindsay Delf. I won’t pick out names in case I miss someone off (!) but without the support of the business and the very engaged and enthusiastic input across the pensions business we’d have struggled to move the work forward.
Involving the whole business means we benefit from different perspectives, gain valuable insight on the day to day interactions with members and ensures that the work we do is looking to focus both on member needs to supporting the operations and member communications teams in particular.
This month we’ve launched the Retirement Planning Tool and the Retirement Checklist, both have been informed by the MX project, how has the MX project contributed to their development – why is it so important?
From an MX perspective it is pretty clear that there is plenty of information available to members via online channels in particular, but that it is not that easy to navigate. From an MX perspective this supports change initiatives such as the retirement planning tool as it helps validate that they’re necessary and a real priority from a member perspective, which is what it’s all about. The retirement planning tool helps direct members to the information that they’ll find helpful in planning for their future, all in one place.
That said, we can’t take too much credit here, the member communications team have taken a high level brief and turned it into exceptional pieces of work.
What else can we expect to see from MX, how do you see it integrating with our future service development for members?
We have only just got going!
As we mature the function I expect to see it making a difference in terms of continually identifying ‘stuff’ that we just need to fix from a short term detailed perspective, and directing the longer term strategy for the support model for members.
The work of MX is multi-channel and, even though there will be an understandable bias towards the development of our digital channels, we’ll be keeping the end to end journey clearly in mind as we look to bring initiatives together from a member experience perspective.
How do you gather member and employer feedback for the MX project?
Dean Blower and his team have recently launched a voice of the member panel where we can get direct insight from members engaged with that initiative. That isn’t the only source of member insight, we get feedback from perception surveys, employers and internal staff who have identified areas for improvement.
We hear from employers via the employer perception survey, the Institutions’ Advisory Panel, the Client Relationship team and of course, general feedback talking with colleagues.
Finally, we always ask for the quick fire favourite five in our Meet the Team interviews…
Film: Aliens
Musician: Metallica
Drink: Coke (full sugar)
Food: Pizza
Holiday destination:The Lake District