PROVIDING PREMIER CUSTOMER SERVICE
Two issues influenced the Corporation’s efforts during 2002 to provide the highest quality of customer service: the recent surge of pension plan terminations and the drive to implement electronic government. While creating Internet-based business capabilities remained a priority for the Corporation, PBGC also had to contend with an unprecedented wave of plan terminations and new plan participants owed guaranteed benefits. These plans included the largest ever terminated in the history of the Corporation—the four LTV Steel plans.
LTV and Its Context
By their size alone, the LTV plans presented PBGC with an acute problem. One of those plans covered about 65,000 hourly workers and retirees, which equaled a full year’s workload by itself. Even without LTV, PBGC became responsible for the benefits of over 100,000 new participants, more than the Corporation had ever absorbed in any prior year in its history. Resources had to be devoted to processing these new people quickly as well as issuing final benefit determinations to those still awaiting them.
The Corporation responded to the challenge through a variety of strategies, several of which required procedural innovations. Customarily, much of PBGC’s administrative work occurs after it has taken responsibility for a pension plan. This usually occurs some time after the plan’s actual termination. In the case of LTV, however, PBGC began working with the company and the United Steelworkers of America several months before plan termination to ensure a seamless transition to PBGC control in the event that the Corporation had to assume responsibility for the plans. Early contact with the company and the union enabled PBGC to identify and resolve numerous policy issues before the Corporation assumed responsibility for the LTV pensions.
One of the principal services desired by participants in newly trusteed plans is information about their pension benefit and the status of their plan’s termination. With LTV, PBGC introduced a new proactive communications program. Before the plans terminated, PBGC sent informational letters to all 83,000 LTV plan participants explaining the situation to them; prior to this, PBGC had never sent its initial letters until after it had trusteed a plan. Because of the size of the LTV plans, the Corporation set up a call center and toll-free telephone number just for the LTV participants and a special LTV page on the PBGC Web site to provide additional information and updates. At PBGC headquarters, special teams of employees were created to manage specific aspects of the transition such as asset management, communications, plan administration, and contracts. The Corporation also set up a special LTV document processing center at one of its field benefit offices and expanded another of the field offices to help with the LTV workload, including participant inquiries.
In a cooperative effort involving offices throughout the Corporation, more than 60 employees successfully prepared PBGC for assumption of the LTV plans. The smooth transfer of the plans from LTV to PBGC allowed more than 50,000 LTV retirees to continue to get their benefits without interruption. PBGC responded to numerous inquiries from LTV participants prior to the plans’ termination. On the day after the LTV plans’ termination in late March, PBGC sent out letters to all the LTV participants advising them that PBGC was now trustee of their plan. Starting in mid-April, the Corporation began mailing out “Welcome Kits” with additional information and application forms at the rate of 10,000 kits per week.
The lessons learned from the trusteeship of the LTV plans also led PBGC to initiate two knowledge management efforts to capture useful information from the experience for application to future large terminations. The goal of these efforts is to develop a “best practices toolkit” that will include checklists, schedules, documents and procedural guidelines, which PBGC staff can use to better serve participants in future cases.
While the new terminations during 2002 became a major focus of PBGC’s attention and resources, the Corporation remained on track with its other principal service for participants in trusteed plans: benefit determinations. Due to the record numbers of new participants owed guaranteed benefits, the number of outstanding benefit determinations awaiting completion rose for the second year in a row, leaving about 276,000 determinations to be completed. Even so, the number of older pending determinations continued to fall; by year-end, and for the first time since the Corporation’s earliest days, PBGC had essentially eliminated its inventory of over-aged determinations. Virtually all benefit determinations pending completion for more than three years had been issued and only 21,000 had been pending completion for more than two years. (PBGC pays benefits in estimated amounts when it begins payments before completion of the benefit determination.)
PBGC has now completed virtually all benefit determinations for plans trusteed prior to October 1, 1999. On average, in 2002 PBGC issued final benefit determinations 3.3 years after the date it had trusteed the participant’s plan, approaching the performance goal of a 3-year average set for 2002 under PBGC’s strategic plan. This was the shortest elapsed time the Corporation has ever needed to produce final benefit determinations and this result was achieved during a time when PBGC was coping with a record increase in workload unparalleled in the Corporation’s history.
PBGC’s accelerated processing of benefits and the automated systems installed since the mid-1990s laid the foundation for the achievements of 2002. By focusing attention on faster trusteeship of plans and faster issuance of benefit determinations, the Corporation was able to eliminate much of its backlog of older cases and pending determinations before the current rush of terminations began in 2001. This, in turn, freed resources that could be turned quickly to addressing new terminations in 2002. During the past fiscal year, the Corporation also upgraded its information technology infrastructure to increase the capacity and improve the reliability of its systems. As a result, the Corporation has more reliable and resilient information systems that are less prone to system-wide failure.
Electronic Government
The influx of more than a quarter-million new participants owed guaranteed benefits over the past two years vividly illustrates the need for, and value of, the ability to conduct business electronically. Current information technology, including Web-based methods of communication, furnishes a cost-effective means of providing prompt, efficient service to a rapidly growing customer base. PBGC recognizes the advantages that electronic government, or e-Gov, offers for improving the responsiveness and quality of PBGC’s service to more than 800,000 participants and plan sponsors, and is committed to realizing those advantages as quickly as possible. PBGC’s priority and ultimate goal is to establish, by the end of 2003, fully personalized Web-accessible accounts that provide each customer—whether plan participant or plan administrator— with secure, fluid access to their benefit or plan information plus the ability to conduct a range of electronic business transactions. These online accounts will supplement, but not supplant, PBGC’s telephone service for its customers.
Analysis of the Corporation’s business transactions and re-engineering of its Web site (www.pbgc.gov) to support electronic transactions during 2001 formed the basis for PBGC’s e-Gov operation. The Corporation added the next layer of its e-Gov program during 2002. Most significantly, PBGC improved the functionality and content of its plan-specific pages, which provide targeted services and information for certain large PBGC-trusteed plans.
One new feature of these pages is a timeline that informs participants about the status of PBGC’s processing of their plan and benefits and explains in detail each phase of the process. The new pages also provide more information about the benefits provided by each plan and guaranteed by PBGC. Ultimately these pages will offer another feature of great interest to participants—an online benefit calculator that will permit participants in these plans to estimate their benefits and to vary certain data such as expected retirement date to see the effect on their benefits. PBGC began testing a benefit estimator for several plans shortly before the year ended.
PBGC also is testing an online customer service center on the new page created for the LTV Steel plans (www.pbgc.gov/ltv). This service center enables PBGC to centralize and coordinate its management of e-mail traffic pertaining to a single plan or group of plans. Participants can use the service center to get answers to commonly asked questions, to ask questions by e-mail, and to search for specific subject areas within the database of questions and answers about their plan. This application will help PBGC track the types of questions participants are raising, provide answers through the online “library” of responses about a plan, and improve the training of PBGC staff by identifying areas in which knowledge of a plan may be lacking.
The LTV Steel page represents a transitional phase in PBGC’s electronic transformation from a static Web site to a Web-based operation. By phasing in changes incrementally, the Corporation is making sure that the changes both work and meet customer needs. The next—and ultimate—phase is fully functional online personalized self-service centers that will allow PBGC customers to access their personal information and handle a range of transactions on their own in a secure authenticated environment. The first to benefit from this new service will be participants in PBGC-trusteed plans, who eventually will have round-the-clock access to their personal data on file with PBGC, including current information on their benefit payments. They will also be able to correct their contact information to quickly reflect changes in their address or telephone number and to request electronic direct deposit of their benefit payments. As the year ended, PBGC was planning to begin testing a pilot self-service center, which it is calling “My Pension Benefit Account,” on a limited basis with some of the LTV Steel plan participants early in 2003. PBGC is also working to develop a similar self-service concept for administrators of PBGC-insured plans, to be called “My Plan Administration Account.”
To further improve customer service, PBGC is conducting a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) pilot project to develop and evaluate a unified means of tracking and coordinating all customer inquiries, including telephone, fax, written correspondence, e-mail or walk-in requests.
Improving Customer Service
PBGC has also found that policy and procedural changes can markedly improve customer service and customer satisfaction. The Corporation adopted two such changes during 2002.
First, a new regulation issued in April allows participants in PBGC-trusteed plans to choose from a menu of optional forms of benefit payments. Participants may elect one of eight optional annuity benefit forms in addition to the forms offered by their plan, and they may now designate a non-spouse beneficiary to receive survivor benefits. (Married participants will need spousal consent to elect some of the optional benefit forms or to name a non-spouse beneficiary.) The regulation also simplifies PBGC’s procedures for paying amounts owed deceased participants where the amount is not an annuity benefit, and allows PBGC to offer an early retirement annuity under certain circumstances for plans that did not have an early retirement provision. The new rule is one of the most significant changes PBGC has made to its benefit payment policy and another step taken to improve the Corporation’s service to plan participants.
The second change involved a re-design of the Corporation’s appeals procedures to accelerate appeals processing while continuing to protect the rights of appellants. PBGC formed an interdepartmental group in 2001 to re-engineer the process of resolving appeals. The group finalized its recommendations early in 2002. Among other measures, the recommendations called for specialized processing of the existing appeals backlog to reduce it quickly and expanded use of information management technology. PBGC began implementing several of the group’s ideas by the end of the year.
PBGC regularly conducts surveys and focus groups with participants, plan administrators and pension professionals to evaluate satisfaction with the Corporation’s service and identify areas where performance did not meet expectations. The comments received guide PBGC as it makes policy and procedural changes to address expressed concerns and improve customer satisfaction.
Until 2001 PBGC had relied solely on its own surveys to gather comments and customer evaluations of its service. These surveys were developed in consultation with experts in the field but were conducted by PBGC employees. Beginning in 2001, the Corporation began using the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) to measure the satisfaction of participants in PBGC-trusteed plans with the service PBGC provides. The ACSI index is a sophisticated, internationally accepted index compiled annually from surveys by a partnership that includes the University of Michigan Business School, the American Society for Quality and the CFI Group. The index, used by 170 major companies and 50 federal agencies, offers an objective third-party measure, independent of PBGC, which can help identify and prioritize areas for customer satisfaction improvement. The index will also be useful to compare PBGC to other government and private-sector organizations that provide similar services. The Corporation began using ACSI in 2002 to determine practitioner satisfaction with its service and to determine users’ satisfaction with PBGC’s Web site.
During 2002 PBGC’s ACSI score for participants in plans that the Corporation has taken over was 74, one point above the goal for the year. Its initial ACSI score for practitioners was 69. The most recent government-wide index (for 2002) was 70. In addition, during its transition to ACSI, PBGC continued to conduct surveys of practitioners throughout the year. According to these surveys, 73 percent of practitioners rated PBGC’s service as “above average” or “outstanding,” a result that showed improvement from 2001 but which fell just short of meeting the Corporation’s 2002 goal.
PBGC's Customer Service Pledge
Our customers deserve our best effort as well as our respect and courtesy.
On the first call from you, our customer, we will say:
We will call you if anything changes from what we first said, give you a status report and explain what will happen next.
We will have staff available from 8:00 a.m. - 5:00 p.m. Eastern time to answer your calls. If you leave a message, we will return the call within one workday.
We will acknowledge your letter within one week of receipt.
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