22.07.2025
In this blog, our Chief Customer Officer, Sara Protheroe, shares how we engage with our members to get regular feedback to continually improve our services.
As the backstop for defined benefit pensions, we're in a unique position. Our members joined the PPF at a stressful time in their lives when their employer or former employer became insolvent. We want to ensure that despite not choosing to be with us, our members receive excellent customer service and trust us to keep protecting their futures.
That’s why I was so proud that this year we received the Institute of Customer Service's ServiceMark accreditation with distinction for the first time [link] and that we maintained our 98 per cent PPF and FAS member satisfaction level for another year running.
As we aim to maintain high levels of customer service and provide reassurance, it's deeply important to us that we regularly engage and gather feedback from our members.
Inviting our members to our Croydon office
Back in January 2009, we invited a group of members to join us in our office in Croydon for the first time. They spent time with various teams across the organisation and had the opportunity to put their questions and comments directly to our CEO.
Over the years, this evolved into what we now call our Member Forum. We hold this twice a year and members are invited to join us in person or online, in our afternoon or evening session.
This is a fantastic opportunity for us to get to know our members better and for them to meet the people behind the organisation that is paying them every month. We share any improvements we’ve made to our services, like our beneficiary nomination process, and create the space for members to share feedback with senior members of our organisation.
In recent Member Forums, we’ve seen an increase in the number of members sharing concerns about the lack of indexation of payments relating to pre-1997 service. We ensure that the concerns our members express at these sessions, as well as through other forms of correspondence, are shared with colleagues at the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), and we’re continuing to prioritise working with government as they consider this issue.
As Chief Customer Officer, I love getting to meet our members through our Member Forums as they connect me to the real purpose of our organisation. Even if we can’t resolve issues there and then, my aim is to make sure members come away feeling understood and heard.
Our commitment to continuous improvement and inviting feedback
Outside of our Member Forum, we’ve created several other channels for members to provide feedback in way that suits them.
We invite any feedback about our service and believe it is invaluable. It helps us to find out what we could do better as well as what we’re doing right, and is ultimately how we’ll continually improve our services for everyone.
At the end of calls with our members, our contact centre advisors ask whether they’d like to take part in a survey. Similarly, when members log out of their member account on our website, they also have the choice to fill in a survey or to leave a comment about their online experience. If we want to get specific feedback about something, we might arrange bespoke user research, for example some recent research about our new nomination service.
We review all the feedback we get, and from these insights look at how we can improve the service we provide, either through making changes to processes or communications, implementing new digital features or through training and development for our colleagues.
Keeping in touch through our annual newsletter
Many of our members won’t need to contact us regularly, but we believe it’s important to stay in touch to reassure them that we’re still here should they need us.
We send an annual newsletter, Member Focus, to all PPF members, either by email or post, to inform members of any new features on our website or changes to our service. This includes an update from our CEO, typically describing our investment performance and other achievements over the year. FAS members receive a separate tailored e-newsletter annually.
Our members are at the heart of what we do and I'm proud that we've created so many ways to engage with them, create opportunities for them to provide feedback in a way that suits them and to reassure them that we’re here to protect their future.
