Europe’s Largest Pension Service Transforms Operational Efficiency with Verint Operations Manager

Discover how NHS Pensions leverage Verint Operations Manager to transform operations and deliver the best possible pension experience.

The results

Reduced response time for pension value estimate requests from 40 to 5 days
Cut completion time for some tasks from 27 to 17 minutes
Addressed 40% increase in workload and 1,500-task backlog within 2 months via efficient and effective resource reallocation
Overcame requirement to recruit and hire more people
Drives proactive, rewarding pensions support

About NHS Pensions

NHS Pensions is responsible for administering the NHS Pension Scheme in England and Wales. The service provides comprehensive support for employers and millions of current staff of the Pension Scheme, together with NHS pensioners, surviving spouses, partners, and descendants.

NHS Pensions has 500 back-office personnel administering pensions across two sites. The team executes an array of complex tasks, including calculating member benefits, managing transfers into, out of, and between pensions, and dealing with bereavements. In addition, a dedicated data department examines records.

Optimize workforce engagement

Prior to Verint, NHS Pensions struggled to optimize workforce engagement. The challenges included:

Workforce forecasting and planning was manual, fragmented, and labour-intensive.
Goal setting, coaching, and the performance development processes were inconsistent.
Distributing and tracking workloads between teams was difficult. For example, where a workflow didn’t exist, spreadsheets were used to identify work priorities. Whiteboards were also commonplace.
There was frequent “triple handling” of cases, which was negatively impacting productivity and having a consequential impact on the employee experience.

Opportunity

As the Forecasting and Planning Manager at NHS Pensions, Jennifer Nicholls saw the problems first-hand. “To put it into context, it took NHS Pensions 40 days on average to respond to member requests for a pension value estimate or total reward statement,” Nicholls explains. “Given that many people have worked for the NHS practically their entire lives, they deserved a better pension experience.”

Nicholls and her team established several objectives for the operational transformation:

Meet employee expectations for flexible working to enable a better work/life balance.
Make common workforce management tasks more efficient for managers, so they spend less time building and modifying schedules.
Implement an intuitive and easy-to-use solution, reducing the time needed to train new employees.
Leverage artificial intelligence (AI) and automation to establish new ways of working and improve efficiency and accuracy.
Maintain a holistic view of the skills and availability of all employees who impact the NHS Pensions service experience.
Create flexibility and scalability by deploying available, skilled employees across different departments when the need arises.

“NHS Pensions is the largest pension service anywhere in Europe. With expert support from Verint and the automation and innovation we have been able to achieve with Verint Operations Manager, we are delivering the pension service experience every member deserves, while simultaneously transforming operational efficiency.”
Jennifer Nichols Forecasting & Planning Manager, NHS Pensions

Transform operational efficiency and service capability with Verint Operations Manager

Using Verint Operations Manager, NHS Pensions has transformed the organisation’s operational efficiency and service capability. Today, the Verint solution is being utilised to its full potential, with multiple innovations helping to maximise capacity, flexibility, and agility, as well as ensure service level agreements (SLAs) are met.

With Verint Operation Manager’s industry-leading capabilities, the NHS Pensions team has been empowered to:

Create end-to-end visibility of complex, multichannel pension administrative transactions and processes, enabling more efficient and effective management of these transactions and processes across departments and locations.
Capture work inputs, regardless of system or channel, and allocate them to employees based on availability and skills.
Within seconds, scrutinise how resources and processes are performing.
Use historic, real-time, and predictive intelligence to drive better decisions and performance.
Achieve better outcomes – from enhanced productivity and compliance to reduced cost to the ability to meet service levels more effectively.

Benefits

NHS Pensions’ visionary deployment helps ensure every member and pensioner receives prompt, proactive service, which is a well-deserved benefit for the many calling NHS home their entire careers. In fact, turnaround time for many pension-related services has been cut from 40 to five days. In many situations, task completion time has been nearly halved.

During a recent unexpected spike in pension enquiries, which saw a backlog of 1,500+ enquiries, NHS Pensions identified an additional 20 skilled resources to clear the backlog in just two months.

Overall, the benefits of the operational transformation, with Verint Operations Manager at the core, have been far and wide:

Re-imagined member experience: During a pilot program, NHS Pensions reduced the time needed to respond to member requests for a pension value estimate (total reward statement) from 40 to five days. When applied to five other services, a similar performance improvement gain was achieved.
Increased performance: By tracking, managing, and improving individual and organizational performance, NHS Pensions is increasing agility. For example, it was able to reduce the time needed to complete one task early in the pension award process from 27 to 17 minutes. Without this improvement, the alternative would have been to recruit more people.
Improved ability to manage demand peaks and valleys more effectively: The recent “McCloud Judgement” legal declaration permitted older members to remain in a legacy pension rather than switch to a newer scheme. This led to a 40 percent increase in workload, which coincided with the peak March/April period for pension enquiries, and a subsequent backlog of 1,500 members potentially not receiving their correct benefits. Using Verint Operations Manager, NHS Pensions was able to allocate 20 skilled staff from other functions to concentrate on the award recovery backlog. In just two months, the entire backlog was addressed, including the thousands of additional enquiries that continued to arrive each week.
Elevated proactive, rewarding pensions support: NHS Pensions will shortly introduce automated email notification, so that members are kept abreast of their case journey.