Pension Wise appointments

From November 2015 to April 2016, I worked in a team of 3 content designers to standardise the advice given at telephone and face-to-face appointments for Pension Wise. We worked closely with our relationship managers and the external partners – The Pensions Advisory Service and Citizens Advice – to write a guide and checklist for the appointment.

Pension Wise was an initiative and website created by HM Treasury.

The appointments needed to run to a set pattern to ensure consistency in the advice given and to make sure they did not overrun because the delivery partners were being paid for a number of appointments of a specific length.

We tested the appointment guides by sitting in on face-to-face appointments and listening to telephone appointments. We also gathered feedback from the advisers. And then we iterated.

These screenshots give you a flavour of how we set out the appointment guides and checklists. They are from drafts that were then iterated (“face-to-face appointments” should be hyphenated).

The appointment guides could not be too rigid. This was a conversation between the adviser and 1 or 2 people. The adviser needed to have the flexibility to answer questions when they were asked – rather than move rigidly through a set script.

Advisers had to be able to answer more than just questions about the options for taking a pension. They also needed to be able to address each person’s specific circumstances. We wrote information to help them with all the eventualities that we can the advisers could foresee.