TPT Retirement Solutions has been managing pension schemes in the UK for over 75 years. They manage £9.6bn in total assets for 448,000 members across the country.
TPT has also been a Leadoo customer since 2023; onboarding the platform to coincide with the launch of its new website, aimed at increasing leads and enhancing user experience. In 2024, the priority shifted to improving the online customer journey and helping users to self-serve – much of which has been done through Leadoo AI.
We sat down with Ben Wood, Digital Marketing Lead at TPT, to discuss how AI is achieving this, within the highly-regulated financial services industry.
The use case for Leadoo and Pensions 💷
As a leading pensions provider, TPT serves many distinct audiences via its website. These include individual members who have questions about their pension, existing clients who need support with their scheme administration, through to prospective clients who are evaluating providers.
Knowing which audience a visitor falls into, and funnelling them to the correct place, is taken care of instantly by Leadoo. As shown above with PensionBot, users can direct their own journeys immediately after landing onsite. For Ben, this is a core use case for Leadoo:
“Our site is visited by a variety of different key audiences. We need our conversational tools to help funnel them clearly, swiftly and relevantly. Not just for lead generation purposes, but for user experience. With something as sensitive as pensions, trust and usability are core values we have to demonstrate throughout our site.”
The conversational tools are serving these different journeys well. In 2024, over one third (38%) of all website visitors engaged with a Leadoo bot.
Streamlining Customer Service through AI 🤖
While the pre-set user pathways on TPT’s chatbots and visual bots have been great for improving UX and signposting these different audiences, a core aim for TPT was to further reduce general FAQs that were getting through to their contact centre.
As Ben explains, “for our senior colleagues, reducing the burden on our busy administration teams was a priority for the new website. Historically we receive a number of repeat questions on how members are able to access their pension, what happens at retirement, etc. While important to address, these enquiries were taking up a lot of manual time for our teams.”
Since September 2024, TPT’s digital team has been using Leadoo AI to completely streamline customer service. Now, AI instantly answers these FAQs through TPT’s ‘PensionBot’.
Successfully streamlining customer service was immediate. In the first two months of AI going live, there was a 32% reduction in website enquiries that came through to the contact centre.
For Ben, while the speed of these AI responses is impressive, their accuracy and consistency is much more important:
“With AI, I knew we needed to build in a feedback loop, so that users could score responses. We ask users if the AI answer gives them what they wanted, or if it doesn’t. I’m pleased to say that in the first month of going live, the acceptance rate on Leadoo AI responses was 92%.”
“We also ask users to score the AI responses, and in October 2024 our average score was 4.41 / 5. While we can’t expect AI to perfectly understand and reply to users in 100% of cases, it is quantifiably serving our customers well and easing the pressure on our administration teams.”
Creating Guardrails for Leadoo AI 🚫
Naturally, when it comes to conversational AI on websites, marketers rightly worry about providing inaccurate information or responses. In particular for TPT, responses given by PensionBot can’t be seen as providing financial advice to its members, and any critical facts should always be checked with TPT’s expert administration teams.
So for Ben and the whole company, stringent guardrails were non-negotiable when implementing Leadoo AI. Thankfully, with the AI’s Knowledge Base configuration, we were able to ringfence all the approved FAQs. This, along with comprehensive testing with our internal teams, meant TPT’s compliance teams were comfortable with PensionBot’s responses, albeit with an AI disclaimer on first engagement. However, as he explains, it does require ongoing testing with Leadoo’s Conversion Experts – in this case Gavin Greer.
“We didn’t want the AI bots being trained solely off all the website content. We have different content for our different audiences, and their points of contact within the business. We needed to create several variants of AI Knowledge Bases that would kick in if the bot identified someone as a defined benefit member, versus if they were a defined contribution member, for example.”
“Gavin and the Leadoo team walked us through this AI training process in great detail. We tested everything extensively, from prompts to different language models. As a result, we feel TPT is industry leading in terms of our use of conversational tech.”
“There are not many in our space giving instant onsite answers to questions about how to access pensions. In the case of a bereavement for example, what we see PensionBot consistently doing in these scenarios is being emotive and sincerely acknowledging a customer’s loss, before immediately and helpfully directing them to appropriate next steps.”
For Gavin, all this testing makes seeing the current acceptance rates of Leadoo AI’s answers extremely rewarding:
“Ben and his team have been truly pioneering with onsite AI. Pensions and financial services is a sector that could naturally be sceptical about non-human responses. But the testing and guardrails we’ve built into Leadoo AI together really shows in the quality of its responses on TPT’s website.”
“The fact users are scoring the responses so highly really validates all the work we’ve done. And shows that AI responses don’t have to be boring and generic. They can be highly targeted to different audiences, user questions, and even customer life circumstances. It’s been a real pleasure to see TPT roll out this industry-unique UX. Which has also led to tangible business benefits for their teams.”
