Colonial First State

Building financial resilience through service.

Digital Strategy

Colonial First State is a leading Superannuation fund and the second largest payer of pensions in Australia.

Customers being able to access support services and self-serve basic financial needs is key to them understanding and managing their financial situation, wellbeing and resilience – both now and for their future.

The problem

For years, retail super funds supported a small, niche group of expert users - financial advisors, who acted as intermediaries, translating a complex product landscape to customers.

The rapid growth of industry funds, selling direct to customers (vs advisers), and the shift in adviser business model to only service high net worth customers left traditional retail super funds & customers in a bind.

To compete in this new landscape and respond to the insight that customers had a gap in servicing needs, the business needed to find sustainable solutions to update a traditional support model & address new customer expectations around online capabilities

“Without being able to easily understand and manage super, it is impossible to build long-term financial resilience.”

— Marcel Jacobs, Future Friendly Design Lead

The solution.

Starting with a new vision anchored in financial wellbeing, prioritising new customer outcomes - visibility, understanding, access & confidence.

To deliver this vision we shifted to a broader business service strategy focused on 100% of members completing key tasks digitally (e.g. access, see, consolidate, manage and take it with me). Solutions resolved customer pain points digitally around these “fundamentals”, while improving capacity for call centres to support more complex customer requests.

Key concepts that underpinned this solution include:

Providing support in-context
Show customers what can be done
Frame pathways with common, but urgent questions
Answer once, clearly

The impact.

For customers we create a better environment to generate financial wellbeing outcomes.

Improving accessibility and flexibility of support content allows customers to gain visibility of their finances and can better understand their super.

Enabling the self-serving of fundamental tasks reduces customer financial anxiety, builds confidence in taking control of their situation and improves their resilience.

For the business there is commercial uplift through improved customer satisfaction in service touchpoints and increased capacity to manage the full range of customer servicing needs at scale.