PensionBee is taking the sting out of pension management with its mobile app, and winning thousands of new customers who love being in control of their pensions by combining their old pensions in one new online plan. Head of Operations Tess Nicholson, the firm’s first BeeKeeper, is now in charge of a 30-strong team, and gives us the low-down.

Tell us how PensionBee does things differently

We challenge the outdated pensions industry that, to our mind, has been stuck in the last century. To bring pensions back into the now we use five PensionBee values: honesty, innovation, love, quality, and simplicity. Whenever decisions are made in the team – big or small – we ask ourselves, does this align with our values?

Working with our core values has really helped us to bring pensions back into the now and to become UK’s most loved pension company.

Innovation is particularly important and a good example of this is a machine we introduced to the office, nicknamed the ‘Millennium Falcon’. It’s a very large, high-speed scanner with OCR software that takes our huge amounts of post – more than 200 pieces a day – and scans it to draw out the most vital bits of customer information and matches it with our database. That’s cut down hugely on what was a very long and painful manual process.

How does Salesforce make life easier for you?

I find it very satisfying to make sure things work well, and I love it when I can give my team the tools to help them work better. We use a lot of workflows, processes, and automation – sometimes it’s very small automations that make a big difference to the team.

I personally like that I can set validation rules to make sure people can’t do things they’re not meant to be doing. That’s something that has helped us grow and means we can feel confident we’re doing things right.

We also use a lot of custom objects to help us keep different processes separate, which seems like a really simple thing but means you can do a lot with just that item without impacting on other things. 

How have you customised Salesforce to meet your needs?

Customisation is key – it’s part of what helps us give our customers a great experience.

As a digital company it’s really important to be able to see what’s happening with your customers’ accounts from a central dashboard. We’ve customised it so when customers add a pension to transfer to PensionBee, there’s a record of it in Salesforce. It’s a fairly complex process as a lot goes into a transfer, but having their own record means we can show a customer where they are in the process, which can then trigger automatic emails specifically about that particular transfer.

Customers see exactly what they need to. As it’s so complex and there are so many stages, it’s really important we have checks where necessary, and Salesforce allows us to do that. 

What plans do you have for the future?

We’re currently mapping out each customer journey from an operational point of view. We’ve realised we need to be more structured about how we name things, so we can better map out all of these workflows and processes and understand where they fit together.

With Salesforce we’re able to use numbers to see where in the journey a particular workflow is coming in. We’ll have a special team working specifically on internal efficiency, as well as any other areas where we think we can be more efficient and add more automation.

What advice do you have for new Trailblazers?

Despite not having a technical background, I find learning about Salesforce and all the ways it can help us be more efficient really exciting. Although it might seem daunting initially, it’s a really great tool, and you shouldn’t be afraid of it.

Don’t feel constrained by what you think you should be doing, make it work for you with customisation. You also don’t have to use every capability that Salesforce offers, you can cherry pick the bits you need and hide functions you don’t use, which is really useful to make it look user-friendly. And remember to always listen to your team, they can tell you how to do things better than anyone else.

To find out more about how PensionBee is letting customers keep their pensions in their pocket read the full story here. Or catch-up on all the latest small business trends in our new report.