Prioritising trust

4 min read
4 min read

COVID-19 restrictions accelerated digital engagement for millions of Australians. From study and work-from-home to food delivery, shopping, entertainment, healthcare and exercise classes. Customers compared how successful and easy it was to get what they wanted, and how interactions with providers made them feel.

As a result, meeting customer expectations just got tougher. The measure of your customer’s experience is now informed by their last best experience with the likes of Netflix, Amazon or Uber Eats – not only your financial service peers.

Our 2021 Superannuation CX Benchmarking report, analysing feedback from 8355 individual fund members and 1155 employers from 26 superannuation funds, found the uptake of digital channels far outweighed the traditional contact channels used to engage with funds, irrespective of member age. Email or online contact form (42 per cent), website and member portal (34 per cent) were the most popular digital channels, but the use of live chat and apps were also featured.

In a sector challenged by disengagement and a ‘set and forget’ mentality, digital engagement is no longer optional – especially among younger members. The ease of effort for members to engage is critical, and digital channels must be integral to the customer experience (CX) offering.

Trust is the #1 driver of overall satisfaction

In recent years, the importance of trust as an influence on customer satisfaction has been on the rise. Our 2021 findings confirm that trust is also the key factor, outside of performance and returns, that will encourage members to stay with the fund long term. And the top driver of trust is feeling valued at an emotional level.

Other key drivers of trust relate to the quality of service in customer interactions, including providing clear information, handling enquiries quickly, and providing required information.

With emotional attributes now alongside financial attributes as having the largest influence on overall satisfaction, empathy and the ability to meet the needs of the customer must become a critical focus for funds.

Trust is at its highest level since 2017

Here’s the good news! Our study found that trust levels have finally returned to pre-Royal Commission levels seen in 2017, with an overall average trust score of 8.3 out of 10. Importantly, the results showed exceptionally stronger trust ratings among members with recent fund contact.

Members with recent fund contact rate higher across all key CX metrics and are less likely to indicate intention to switch funds, compared to less engaged members without recent fund contact.

In what may be a small silver lining, the pandemic has provided unexpected opportunities for funds to support members through challenging times. The positive impressions formed through these important customer experiences have helped to rebuild trust for many funds.

The challenge now is to protect and build trust through further engagement and high-quality customer experience.

Be trustworthy every time

While trust is built over time from consistent positive experiences at the transactional level, the more we can engage through high quality interactions, the more trust deepens. By aligning success, ease and sentiment with each customer interaction, funds will certainly be able to lift their trust levels. It is therefore important to:

  1. Create opportunities for consistent engagement
    Customise a range of interactions for specific customer types and needs to add value and deepen your relationships.
  2. Offer an omni-channel experience
    Digital engagement is no longer optional, and the experience needs to be seamless across channels and touchpoints. It is crucial that your customers have choice around how they engage with you, and you make it easy for them, irrespective of the channel.
  3. Focus on quality
    Think about quality in terms of customer’s experience, rather than only in relation to product knowledge, governance and compliance. Design specific and measurable standards for each channel and contact type that focus on the customer.
  4. Perform independent Quality Assurance assessments
    It is critical that objective QA assessments show exactly how you are performing, enabling you to adjust your interactions accordingly. The assessments must review both digital and person-to-person interactions.
  5. Empower your frontline teams
    An interaction quality framework provides clarity on what is within each agent’s scope to provide exceptional customer experiences. While technology such as Artificial Intelligence and chat bots have enhanced customer service, the human element of communication is paramount in building trust. Personalised customer interactions including effective questioning and triaging, can only strengthen a member’s relationship with your fund. Additionally, you strengthen your team, as staff enjoy the coaching which allows them to provide a better service.
Picture of By Sam Monteath

By Sam Monteath

CX director of finance, CSBA

More Reading

Q&A with IFM Investors’ David Whiteley
In-Depth In-Depth

Q&A with IFM Investors’ David Whiteley

Super system can turbocharge productivity on road to net zero
In-Depth In-Depth

Super system can turbocharge productivity on road to net zero

Understanding the Division 296 super tax
In-Depth In-Depth

Understanding the Division 296 super tax

Carmen Beverley-Smith

Executive Director - Superannuation, Life & Private Health Insurance, APRA

Sessions

Keynote 8 – Navigating the energy transition: opportunities, investor strategies and policy needs

Carmen joined APRA in March 2023 and holds the role of Executive Director, Life and Private Health Insurance and Superannuation.  

She has had an esteemed career in financial services, spanning over 25 years. She has held diverse leadership roles at Westpac and Commonwealth Bank of Australia, including across risk, transformation and change, product and portfolio development, and sales and service. 

Prior to joining APRA, she held the role of General Manager, Risk Transformation Delivery Integration at Westpac. This involved leading the group-wide implementation of a suite of solutions to uplift risk management capability and develop data, analytics and reporting. 

Carmen leads with a values-driven approach and a particular interest in developing and mentoring talent. 

She holds a Bachelor of Commerce and Accounting, is a certified Chartered Accountant and a Graduate of the Australian Institute of Company Directors. 

Amy C. Edmondson

Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management, Harvard Business School

Sessions

Keynote 8 – Navigating the energy transition: opportunities, investor strategies and policy needs

Amy C. Edmondson is the Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at the Harvard Business School, a chair established to support the study of human interactions that lead to the creation of successful enterprises that contribute to the betterment of society.

Edmondson has been recognized by the biannual Thinkers50 global ranking of management thinkers since 2011, and most recently was ranked #1 in 2021 and 2023; she also received that organization’s Breakthrough Idea Award in 2019, and Talent Award in 2017.  She studies teaming, psychological safety, and organisational learning, and her articles have been published in numerous academic and management outlets, including Administrative Science Quarterly, Academy of Management Journal, Harvard Business Review and California Management Review. Her 2019 book, The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation and Growth (Wiley), has been translated into 15 languages. Her prior books – Teaming: How organizations learn, innovate and compete in the knowledge economy (Jossey-Bass, 2012), Teaming to Innovate (Jossey-Bass, 2013) and Extreme Teaming (Emerald, 2017) – explore teamwork in dynamic organisational environments. In Building the future: Big teaming for audacious innovation (Berrett-Koehler, 2016), she examines the challenges and opportunities of teaming across industries to build smart cities. 

Edmondson’s latest book, Right Kind of Wrong (Atria), builds on her prior work on psychological safety and teaming to provide a framework for thinking about, discussing, and practicing the science of failing well. First published in the US and the UK in September, 2023, the book is due to be translated into 24 additional languages, and was selected for the Financial Times and Schroders Best Business Book of the Year award.

Before her academic career, she was Director of Research at Pecos River Learning Centers, where she worked on transformational change in large companies. In the early 1980s, she worked as Chief Engineer for architect/inventor Buckminster Fuller, and her book A Fuller Explanation: The Synergetic Geometry of R. Buckminster Fuller (Birkauser Boston, 1987) clarifies Fuller’s mathematical contributions for a non-technical audience. Edmondson received her PhD in organisational behavior, AM in psychology, and AB in engineering and design from Harvard University.

 

Daniel Mulino MP

Assistant Treasurer and Minister for Financial Services

Sessions

Keynote 8 – Navigating the energy transition: opportunities, investor strategies and policy needs

Born in Brindisi, Italy, Daniel was a young child when he moved with his family to Australia. He grew up in Canberra and completed his first degrees – arts and law – at the ANU. He then completed a Master of Economics (University of Sydney) and a PhD in economics from Yale.

He lectured at Monash University, was an economic adviser in the Gillard government and was a Victorian MP from 2014 to 2018. As Parliamentary Secretary to the Treasurer of Victoria, Daniel helped deliver major infrastructure projects and developed innovative financing structures for community projects.

In 2018 he was preselected for the new federal seat of Fraser and became its first MP at the 2019 election, re-elected in 2022 and 2025. From 2022 to 2025, Daniel was chair of the House of Representatives’ Standing Economics Committee in which he chaired inquiries; economic dynamism, competition and business formation and insurers’ responses to 2022 major floods claims.

In 2025, he became the Assistant Treasurer and Minister for Financial Services.

In August 2022, Daniel published ‘Safety Net: The Future of Welfare in Australia’, which aims to explore the ways in which an insurance approach can improve the effectiveness of government service delivery.