Four reasons your super fund’s registry is not a CRM system

For superannuation funds, the registry is critical for understanding members’ and employers’ transaction information. From payments to insurance and other fees, the registry keeps track of each member's incoming and outgoing funds. With Australia’s superannuation assets expected to triple in the coming years to over $11 trillion by 2043, there will be increasing scrutiny of funds that underperform the industry benchmarks. Further, funds will need to get smarter with how they engage their stakeholders.

While some of the data stored in your super fund’s registry may be helpful for understanding a customer’s journey, it doesn’t provide the full picture. Super funds need a customer relationship management (CRM) system to get a full view of their member and employer activities to proactively provide unrivalled service. Keep reading below to learn why your registry is not an adequate CRM system.

1. Registries are for financial information, not business processes

While your super fund’s registry is purpose-built to store financial information, it’s not configured to manage and improve business processes. Ideally, your fund will implement a CRM system that integrates with your registry, enabling all processes to flow from your CRM. Not only does this provide a single source of truth for your fund's data, but it’s also more efficient to manage changes from one place.

Some of the changes you might make in your CRM and push through to your other systems include:

• Change of address: If you need to change the address of a customer, whether it’s a member or employer, this is best done from a CRM where it can push the data out to your integrated systems, including your registry. A CRM will also enable nuanced changes, such as pre-scheduling address changes
• Letter of authority: Nominating a financial advisor, family member or other qualified professional to manage an account is common practice when managing someone’s superannuation. While you may be able to see the person of authority for one member in the registry, a CRM provides richer data, such as being able to view the full record of the person with authority.
• Event management: Understanding the activities completed for each employer is critical for proactively upholding the service level agreements (SLAs) set with organisations. Within a CRM, these activities can be viewed from a high level and analysed down to each specific engagement.

2. Member and employer engagement data is siloed without a purpose-built CRM

Members and employers are two of the most important stakeholder groups in superannuation funds. Many super funds have separate CRM systems for managing these stakeholder groups, resulting in more work and manual tasks to understand a fund’s engagement activities clearly. Further, data siloes don’t enable teams to collaborate more effectively for stronger results. A unified CRM, such as Superware’s Unify, does as the name suggests. It unifies a fund’s member and employer data into one CRM system, providing a clear view of activities across both groups, what’s working and insights to inform how engagement with these groups could be improved.

With a unified CRM system in your super fund, your member services and business development teams can:

• view all employments a member has had since being with your fund
• see a member’s contributions from multiple employers
• understand which members are attending events
• know the right business contacts for each employer
• manage security concerns and ensure only the right people have access to certain information, such as member balances.

3. You can’t maximise the value of your engagement activities without a CRM

A CRM system purpose-built for the superannuation sector empowers teams within super funds to understand how their engagement activities are performing. And with organisations seeing a return of over $8 for every dollar invested in a CRM, these systems can help super funds provide better customer service, which results in better member and employer attraction and retention.

Let’s consider an example…

With a purpose-built CRM system, a person in a super fund’s business development team can view current and prospective employer accounts, the engagement activities completed with those accounts, and the results these activities generate. By analysing engagement activities, business development teams can proactively identify how to maximise the value of their future events based on member engagement for parameters such as locations, specific member cohorts, and more.

4. Segmentation is the future of marketing and business development

With artificial intelligence (AI) making it possible to deliver engagement activities more efficiently, personalisation will add the extra touch of professionalism stakeholders need to act. An enterprise-grade CRM application allows marketing and business development professionals to build hyper-personalised experiences across multiple channels with segmentation. A recent Forrester study found that 71% of people engage less with digital content than they did in the previous year, so it’s critical to deliver tailored content to engage members and employers.

Segmentation allows marketing and business development teams to build bespoke journeys for specific cohorts. For example, your fund may create an audience based on the location, employment stage and age of some members and deliver tailored content and events to help them plan for their retirement. Similarly, for younger members new to superannuation, education campaigns about the importance of saving for retirement and other relevant information, such as the power of salary-sacrificing to boost super contributions, can be helpful to keep members engaged. This level of segmentation is only possible on CRM systems embracing the future of marketing with AI, and it’s not possible simply with a registry on its own.

Boost your member and employer engagement with Superware

In an environment where it’s becoming increasingly important to provide an unrivalled customer experience, superannuation funds need to ensure they have a CRM system that empowers their member engagement and business development teams to better serve their stakeholders. While your fund’s registry may be a good source of financial information, a purpose-built CRM system that unifies member and employer data is the gold standard in being a super fund that is proactive with its engagement activities.

Superware’s Unify is the only CRM system that super funds need to serve, engage and grow with ease. Contact us to learn more and see Unify in action.