How We Got Buy-In for Customer-First Work: Lessons From the Gender Pension Gap.
Here is something I learned the hard way, for anyone trying to get buy-in for customer-first work inside a big organisation.
A few years ago, my team's focus was financial inclusion. How do you get more customers to understand and engage with their finances? In pensions, that is a big ask.
The research kept leading us to the same place: the gender pension gap. The figure we were working with was that women end up with roughly 40% less saved than men by retirement. (I have written more about the gap itself in closing the gender pension gap will take more than good intentions.)
I was biased, and the case still stood up
I believed in it completely. I appreciate I am biased. I am a woman whose whole financial knowledge was built from happening to fall into financial services as a job. I am one of three sisters, and I have been surrounded by women all my life, through whom I could see a lot of this first hand.
But beyond the personal, the case was credible from both a customer retention and a commercial perspective.
And let's just be honest for a second. A lot of initiatives like this land in the ‘nice to have’ or ‘philanthropy’ bucket. Even when they do not, there are huge challenges when it comes to prioritisation. Believing in something does not get it a budget line.
So how did we get the buy-in?
We told a story instead of presenting findings
Not “engagement is low among female customers”.
That sentence is true. It is also very easy to nod at and move on from. A story about a real person, and what happens to her money over a working life, gives people something to hold on to in a way a statistic rarely does.
We brought the customer's voice into the room
Real quotes, from real women.
It is much harder to deprioritise someone you have just heard speak. A data point is easy to push to next quarter. A woman describing her own situation, in her own words, is much harder to ignore.
We aligned it with the commercials
Engaged customers stay, consolidate and contribute more. Women also live longer than men on average. Do the maths.
An inclusion strategy can also be a growth strategy. The two are not mutually exclusive, and the sooner a business case says so plainly, the sooner it gets taken seriously.
Some people feel uncomfortable putting a commercial lens on work they care about for its own sake. I understand that, but I think it is a mistake. The commercial case gives the people holding the budget a reason to say yes that does not depend on them sharing your convictions.
What happened next
We got the investment, and we launched webinars to thousands of women, educating them on the basics of finance.
If you are sitting on customer work you cannot get funded, my bet is the idea is fine. More often, the room just has not heard the customer yet.
So before your next prioritisation conversation, it is worth asking whether the people in that room have actually heard from a customer. A real voice, rather than a summary of a summary.
If you have a customer-first idea that keeps stalling at prioritisation, book an intro call. Helping teams build the case, and bring the customer into the room, is a big part of what I do.