Journey mapping, personas, and data drove the Plan's communication overhaul, says Nicole Quintal
Most pension plan managers have come to realize that implementing and mastering personalized communication for their members is no easy feat.
The Co-operative Superannuation Society (CSS) Pension Plan is no exception. Notably, it took more than a decade for the Plan to move from early experiments with targeted content to a working personalization strategy.
As Nicole Quintal noted during Thursday’s Canadian Pension and Benefits Institute (CPBI) Saskatchewan conference, CSS's earliest experiments with targeted communication date back to 2011, when the plan launched a video series with separate presentations for early career, mid-career, late career, and retiree audiences.
But it was the more rigorous design thinking work - journey mapping, persona development, portal revamps - which began about five or six years ago, with COVID accelerating the push toward digital, that led to the Plan’s successful strategy.
The personalization strategy itself has been in the works for roughly two years, built on member surveys, website and email analytics, and research into what pension plans in Australia and fintech companies like Wealthsimple and Questrade are doing with CRM systems. Still, Quintal acknowledged the Plan still faced several roadblocks in the process.
“I think the content creation was a big roadblock for our small team,” said Quintal, manager of brand and digital engagement at CSS. This time, we’re creating twice, three times as much content as we used to in the past. There were people in the organization who maybe felt like they didn't have a voice in this.”
While CSS didn’t hire a dedicated content creator to manage the increased workload, the plan moved to a cross-functional model, pulling in its advisory, member experience, and investment teams to co-author content.
"We're writing blog articles together and it's actually providing a better output in terms of the content as well because we're getting their expertise baked into that as well," Quintal noted.
The Saskatchewan-based defined contribution plan serves over 58,000 members spread across Canada, ranging from gas station attendants to credit union executives. Reaching all of them with relevant, timely pension information meant rethinking not just what CSS sends, but how and when it sends it.
"We used to think of what their experience is when they join CSS. But we realized we were missing an opportunity to connect with pre-members of the plan because there's likely information about us on their employer's intranet," Quintal said.
That realization forced a rethink, Quintal noted, where they built a personalized communication strategy using design thinking tools that most pension plans talk about but few implement with strong results.
According to Quintal, personalized pension communication has to be built on a clear framework. She believes the work starts with journey mapping, then moves into persona development, with empathy, data and technology supporting both. Together, those elements allow organizations to segment members more intelligently and deliver more relevant communication based on where someone is in their relationship with the Plan.
She framed journey mapping as a design thinking exercise that forces pension teams to look at the full member experience from the outside in. That means following the member from the point of hire through contribution years, retirement planning, retirement, and the retiree stage, while identifying the moments when communication matters most. The point is to understand what members are dealing with at each stage, not just what the organization wants to send.
Quintal also suggested that journey mapping is useful because it exposes the gap between internal processes and the actual member experience. It can reveal pain points, duplication, and inefficiencies, while also helping teams assess whether existing services work as intended. Moreover, each stage carries its own set of decisions.
For example, part-time employees may be weighing whether to participate at all while new members are selecting investment options and completing paperwork. But the longest phase - the active membership years - can span decades and is shaped by life events like job changes, shifts in marital status, or relocation to a different jurisdiction. Even individual online behaviour, such as an incomplete retirement plan on the website, can serve as a trigger for targeted outreach.
To that end, she underscored how journey mapping is what brings those personas into focus by revealing shared behaviors, needs, goals, and pain points across different groups.
“These personas really become the foundation of your targeted and personalized communication strategy,” she said. “It's going to help you determine the tone of the content, the different channels you might want to reach your members in and connecting with these personas in ways that are relevant to them. Your personas are ultimately going to help you decide the data points that you're going to need to be able to segment your audience and send out the various communications, especially if you're doing an omnichannel strategy.”
After defining core personas, Quintal highlighted the next step is understanding them more deeply, pointing to empathy mapping as a way to examine what members are thinking, hearing, saying, and struggling with at different stages of life. That helps teams decide what information to send and when to send it. She also argues this process works best when frontline staff, IT, and member experience teams are involved, since each sees different parts of the member journey.
From there, the harder task is linking personas to data and technology. Despite many organizations stopping at the persona stage, she noted, real personalization depends on identifying the data points needed to segment audiences in useful ways. Those can include birth date, account balance, plan start date, location, and email address.
She also emphasized how connected systems make that segmentation practical. For example, if a pension administration platform shares data with a CRM through an API, member records can update in real time and trigger automated workflows. That allows organizations to send timely, targeted messages, such as welcome emails for new members, without manual effort. The result is more relevant communication delivered at scale.
Quintal ultimately emphasized this strategy as a way to find opportunities to improve the experience over time, with technology then helping teams act on those insights through more targeted, timely, and automated communication.
“Using these steps, we're ultimately aiming for members who are satisfied, loyal, and an advocate for your brand. By investing in creating digital experiences that truly connect, your plan can achieve a better sense of member loyalty, and that's going to create a happy member and help strengthen your brand,” said Quintal.
“We want to give them easy to use, enjoyable experiences across every touch point and a relevant experience that resonates with them. Of course we want to reach members, and we know we need to provide services and resources that are personalized, engaging, relevant, and timely. By bringing our digital experience strategy to life, we are confident we will create these member outcomes. We want empowered members that are using personalized and timely information to achieve financial security in retirement,” she added.
