Service excellence

As part of our commitment to delivering excellent service, OPTrust also carries out an ongoing client satisfaction survey to gather members’ and pensioners’ input on the quality of various aspects of the service we provide. In 2010, almost 800 members and pensioners responded, giving us an overall satisfaction rating of 8.7 out of 10, bettering our target score for the year and up slightly from our 8.6 average in 2009.

One section of the survey asks clients who have contacted us by telephone to rate the quality of our personal phone service against that provided by other organizations they deal with. In 2010, our telephone service received particularly high scores, with members and pensioners giving us an average rating of 9.3 out of 10, up from 9.0 in 2009, and exceeding our target score for the second year in a row.

In 2010, OPTrust staff processed more than 61,000 transactions, down slightly from 2009. These transactions cover a wide range of personal and career events, from enrolling new members in the Plan and processing their pension buybacks to providing pension estimates and starting their monthly pensions when they retire.

To track our effectiveness, we measure the time it takes to complete each transaction, benchmarking our performance for more than 70 different types of cases. This allows us to monitor service levels on an ongoing basis and quickly identify areas where we can enhance service.

In 2010, our member and pensioner services staff completed 81% of total transactions within our service standard, compared to our 86% target for the year and our 85% average for 2009. The dip in on-time case completions in 2010 reflected changes to the Plan including i) a new “open option” buyback allowing members to purchase credit on an actuarial cost basis after the normal 24-month application deadline, and ii) a change in the method for calculating the cost of reinstating service that was previously transferred out of the Plan. Together these two changes generated a spike of thousands of requests for buyback quotes, many of them requiring complex actuarial calculations.

Partly because of these changes, the number of overdue cases at year-end rose to 16.4%, up from 11.3% in 2010. The number of cases overdue by 30 days or more increased to 5.9% over 2010, up from 5% the previous year. With these major plan changes behind us, we expect a steady recovery in our case completion performance in 2011.