In the second of our blogs on how EVDirect’s QuickTools can be used to inspire your employees to understand their financial situation better, we look at the importance of providing clear and meaningful outputs designed to maintain user engagement – with their financial wellness at stake.
Pension and benefit providers are increasingly focused on promoting financial wellness in the workplace, an important aim today but not a simple matter when people can be hard to engage about the ‘sometimes future’. However, nudging them with interesting leading questions can start the ball rolling (as discussed in our previous blog, Keep things simple to quickly engage consumers with their personal finances).
Still, the next challenge is not to allow this newfound interest to wane. So here is where EVDirect’s QuickTools score particularly high, with their easily digested outputs that pop up after some basic details are entered.
Leading questions designed to engage and educate
For example, the question posed is: ‘What lifestyle could I afford when I retire?’ The tool does some quick number-crunching after a few bits of information are added by the user, and then shows the screen below displaying an estimated outcome based upon realistic market forecasts:
A more pragmatic further question could be: ‘What’s the impact on my retirement if I save more?’ This is where the user can play around with some percentages in their pension contributions to see how this would improve their future retirement pot and projected in-retirement income:
And then, there can be a calming introduction to the issue of risk, a topic that can scare off people if not raised carefully. The question can simply be phrased as: “What level of investment risk should I take?” and the output can reassure as well as inform:
Building confidence in future outcomes, step by step
Apart from this pictorial style of presentation instantly capturing interest, the user gets a nice boost to their financial education as they grasp that by some tweaking of their inputs (e.g. increasing their pension contributions), they can expect an improvement in their financial situation as they enter retirement.
With the QuickTools targeting a specific output linked to a particular question, the employee obtains a clear picture of their prospects and learns what they can do to change course if what they see doesn’t fit with their aspirations. It’s a far cry from a conventional approach to guidance, where the unadvised individual can be overloaded with complex financial numbers and jargon and yet expected to know enough (or be inspired enough) to make sensible decisions affecting their future.
The real advantages of deploying EVDirect’s QuickTools as the start of the user journey to financial wellness include:
- Very engaging front-ends provide a novel and refreshing approach to previously challenging financial topics
- Users don’t need to input lots of data to obtain informative answers
- Simple tools deliver clear, easy-to-understand outputs
- Maximises the educational value for users
- Improves users’ confidence in dealing with their financial future
- Scope to innovate by creating additional tailored front-ends to suit providers’ requirements.
So what next?
