From now on, we’ll publish a Customer Impact report each year. As part of this, we’ll keep you up to date with developments from the previous year.
Pensions A-day
2006 saw the biggest shake-up in pensions legislation for well over 15 years, with the Government making major changes to the rules surrounding all aspects of private pensions.
This affected over one million AEGON Scottish Equitable customers. It was extremely important for everyone affected to have access to the right technical help and products, and for advisers to be able to help people understand the legislation and make any necessary changes to their pension provision.
We were very pleased to win two awards from financial trade publication Money Marketing for our work to prepare for A-day. One was for our online tools to make the transition to the new regime easier, and the other was for our overall A-day readiness.
Reaching more customers
While new business volumes are by no means the only way we judge our success, it’s a reflection of how our products and services are perceived by the market and how well they’re meeting customers’ needs.
2006 was a record year for AEGON Scottish Equitable, with more people than ever before buying our products. The vast majority were recommended to do so by independent professional advisers.
Our challenge is to maintain and improve the standard of service we provide to each of our growing number of customers.
Enhancing products
If you’ve saved in a pension for several years, it’s important that you can turn your fund into a retirement income on the best available terms.
In 2006, we set ourselves the target of being one of the three most competitive annuity providers. We decided that as well as providing annuities to existing pension savers, we’d open up our product to those who’d saved with another provider.
We’re pleased that our annuity product is frequently ranked in the industry’s top three, and to have given many more pension savers access to highly competitive rates. At the same time, the Customer Impact survey shows our annuity customers rate us highly on our service.
As well as improving our annuity offering to individuals, we also launched a new plan that trustees of group schemes can use to secure retirement income for groups of pension scheme members.
Product design
Also in 2006, we redesigned our approach for developing and launching new products. These reflect the increased emphasis we’re placing on researching products with customers, making sure complaints are fed back to the people responsible for design, and explicitly stating the type of customer a specific product is right for. All of our marketing people have received detailed training on this.
Our refreshed values
Large companies can sometimes lose sight of why they’re there and who their customers are. After much research and analysis, in 2006 AEGON refocused on the core values which are important to us all, and we made sure our employees really understood what these mean for how they interact with customers. By continually pushing ourselves to be innovative, open and transparent, and experts in our field, we believe we can continue to meet your needs.
As well as what we do, we’ve thought long and hard about the way that we do things. Specifically, we’ve been considering how our behaviour has an impact on you. Over time, our new criteria will ensure that all of our employees are recruited and rewarded, not just for what they do but for how they do it.
We expect that the work we’ve been doing on our values and behaviour will help us to keep improving the service we provide you for years to come.
