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Transforming Pension Conversations
- Conversation design,
- Pensions
How behavioural science helped Standard Life improve customer engagement and business outcomes
The Challenge
Standard Life has been helping customers manage their life savings for nearly 200 years, supporting over 4.5 million customers with their pensions.
As pension decisions are complex and often emotionally significant, conversations with customers can be difficult. Many customers feel overwhelmed when discussing pensions and struggle to understand what actions they should take.
Standard Life wanted to improve the experience of their contact centre interactions so that customers could make better decisions about their financial future. However, traditional scripts often fail to consider how people actually process information and make decisions. The challenge was:
How can behavioural science make pension conversations clearer, more engaging and more effective for both customers and employees?
Customers don’t need more pension information. They need clearer decisions.
Our approach
Cowry partnered with Standard Life to redesign their contact centre conversations using behavioural science.
- Behavioural audit – We conducted a behavioural audit of existing call scripts to identify the psychological friction points preventing effective conversations.
- Friction analysis – Our analysis revealed that pension conversations often create cognitive overload. Customers receive too much information at once and struggle to identify the most important actions they should take.
- Behavioural design – Using these insights, we redesigned the call experience and developed a behavioural playbook containing over 65 behavioural nudges to guide customer conversations.
Behavioural insight
Our research identified three behavioural challenges affecting pension conversations.
1. Cognitive Overload
What we observed
Customers often struggle to process the large amount of information presented during pension discussions.
Why it happens
Pensions involve complex terminology, multiple options and long-term decisions that are difficult to evaluate.
What it means
Conversations must simplify information and guide customers toward clear next steps.
2. Decision Uncertainty
What we observed
Customers frequently feel unsure about what action to take next.
Why it happens
When information is ambiguous, people delay decisions or disengage from the conversation.
What it means
Clear frameworks and structured decision pathways help customers feel more confident about taking action.
3. Trust and Authority
What we observed
Customers are more likely to engage when they perceive expertise and credibility.
Why it happens
Financial decisions require reassurance and confidence in the person providing advice.
What it means
Signals of authority and expertise can increase trust and engagement.
The solution
Cowry redesigned Standard Life’s contact centre playbook to incorporate behavioural science into everyday customer conversations. The playbook introduced more than 65 behavioural nudges to improve clarity, engagement and trust.
Examples included:
Simplifying decisions
To reduce ambiguity, we introduced a simple framework for consolidating pension pots:
Collect → Check → Complete
This provided customers with a clear and memorable pathway for taking action.
Using social norms
Agents highlighted how many other customers benefit from using the online platform, leveraging social norms to encourage adoption.
Establishing authority
The support team was repositioned to reinforce expertise and credibility.
The team was renamed from “Priority Support” to “Priority Plus”
Advisors were given the title “Priority Plus Consultants”
These changes subtly increased perceptions of authority and professionalism.
Impact:
The behavioural redesign delivered significant improvements across customers, employees and the business.
Employees reported greater confidence when using the new call guides.
+4.6
%
increase in customer satisfaction
0
%
increase in business leads
0
additional customers reached through rollout
“We believe in partnering with experts and Cowry has a proven methodology using cognitive and behavioural psychology that really works. Through our pilots we have already seen significant benefits across the business in how we support customers and make it easier for them to engage and make good decisions about their financial futures.”
Michael Reed-Smith
Retail Director, Standard Life
Why it worked
The project succeeded because it redesigned the structure of conversations, not just the script. By reducing cognitive overload, introducing clear decision pathways and reinforcing trust, behavioural science helped create conversations that were easier for customers to understand and act upon.
Following the success of the pilot, Standard Life began embedding behavioural principles across other areas of the business.
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