In many financial journeys, the real barrier isn't a lack of information - it's the lack of effective support that helps customers turn that information into action.
Jenny Hazan, Director of Customer Strategy & Engagement at Legal & General, explains how behavioural insight, smart technology, and service design can help people make confident decisions about pensions, protection, and long-term savings.
In this episode, we explore what it takes to communicate complex products in ways customers can genuinely understand and act on.
Jenny Hazan shares how L&G is shifting from awareness-led communications to outcome-led journeys, why behavioural insight can outperform demographic segmentation, and how the best digital experiences make it easier for people to take the next step - without losing the human touch.
The episode covers confidence-led engagement, behavioural segmentation, vulnerability, the Guided Retirement Planner, scaling personalisation, and clean hand-offs from digital to human support.
Created from episode transcript
Engagement Means Confidence, Not Clicks
One useful starting belief changes how you design customer communications.
Great engagement helps people build confidence rather than chasing more clicks, more content, or yet more education.
Confidence supports behaviour change, and behaviour change is what improves financial outcomes over time.
"Engagement isn't about clicks or content. It's about helping people build confidence, change behaviour, and build momentum that helps people act earlier and retire better."
Jenny Hazan, Director of Customer Strategy & Engagement, Legal & General
This framing matters because it challenges an old industry instinct.
For years, many firms equated compliance with completeness. If the customer received all the information, the job was done.
But in practice, information can become a barrier when it is not prioritised, timed, and made actionable.
Education still matters, especially when decisions carry real emotional weight, but completeness on its own rarely drives action.
Why Demographics Do Not Explain Financial Behaviour
It means understanding how people think, act, and behave when it comes to money and their future.
That means looking beyond age, marital status, or pension pot value. Those factors may describe someone, but they do not reliably predict whether someone will act.
Instead, L&G combines internal and external data to understand things like confidence levels, motivations, and behavioural biases.
The goal is to anticipate the barriers that stop people making informed choices - then design experiences that make the next step clearer and easier.
The Barriers That Stop Customers Acting
Biases That Create Inaction
Practical examples of biases appear repeatedly in retirement planning.
Some people rely on social proof. They want to see what others are doing before they take action.
Some people fall into the ostrich effect. When something feels complex or emotionally overwhelming, they put their head in the sand because avoidance feels safer.
These patterns matter because they explain a key misconception in the industry.
Many customers are not inactive because they do not care. They are inactive because the journey feels too hard to start.
They are inactive because the emotional weight of "what if I am behind" makes avoidance feel like relief.
Complexity Is Emotional, Not Just Cognitive
Pensions carry technical complexity and emotional weight in equal measure.
They connect to identity, success, security, family, and overwhelm.
Vulnerability Changes With Life Events
Vulnerability is a critical factor in customer outcomes.
Vulnerability may come from low confidence or low financial understanding.
It may come from what is happening in someone's life right now. It may come from stress, illness, bereavement, or a sudden change in circumstances.
That is why firms need to treat vulnerability as something dynamic. People move in and out of vulnerability depending on context.
This aligns with the FCA's expectations around the fair treatment of vulnerable customers, which emphasise adapting support and communications based on customer needs and circumstances.
What Customers Are Really Asking
Customers usually come back to a small set of questions.
What do I even have?
What is it going to look like in the future?
What does it mean for me?
How are you going to help me?
What should I do next?
These questions show why "engagement" can feel vague. A clearer frame is a chain of behaviours.
The job is to make the next step clear, relevant, and achievable rather than pushing people to the finish line in one leap.
"Engagement is a chain of behaviours, so we break journeys down and make it simple to understand the one piece of information you need, and the next action to take."
Jenny Hazan, Director of Customer Strategy & Engagement, Legal & General
Right Prompts at the Right Moment
One of the most useful examples comes from everyday consumer tech.
Fitness watches do not work because they educate you about health benefits. They work because they trigger a simple, relevant prompt at the right time.
"Stand up now" works because it is immediate and actionable.
Financial communications need to do the same thing. They need to connect to the customer's life right now.
They need to arrive at a moment when action is realistic. They need to avoid trying to solve retirement in one email.
From Behavioural Insight to Smart Technology
Behavioural insight is only half the equation. The second half is technology that can deliver, adapt, and learn.
Insight helps you understand needs and anticipate barriers. Technology helps you respond to those needs in real time.
It also helps you measure whether customers are progressing - and where they are getting stuck.
The Guided Retirement Planner: A Practical Example
It brings together a more holistic picture of finances, looking beyond pensions to include savings, and even property as an asset.
It adapts in real time based on what L&G already holds about the member and what the member inputs during the journey.
It is designed to be completed in steps. People can save progress and exit at any time, then return when they are ready.
Plain Language That Helps People Decide
Language is part of the product experience.
Retirement options are often communicated using language or jargon that confuse people. The goal is to explain what options mean in real terms while keeping the detail intact.
The aim is to make sure the customer understands enough to choose confidently. It is also about giving the customer a way to explore trade-offs.
If the plan suggests a shortfall, the experience is designed to show options to address it, rather than ending with a dead-end message.
This includes exploring phased retirement, part-time work, and different approaches to taking income.
Evidence of Action, Not Just Interaction
Success needs a behavioural definition.
Meaningful action matters more than whether someone opened an email or started a tool session.
In L&G's own reporting on the planner, it states that around one in five pension customers aged 55+ had begun the journey, with a meaningful portion taking actions such as consolidating pensions, changing retirement age, or adjusting contributions. Importantly, L&G have also seen a 50% reduction in the number of customers facing a projected shortfall at retirement after adjusting their plan.
That difference matters because it shifts the internal conversation. You stop optimising for engagement metrics. You start optimising for customer outcomes.
This approach aligns with the Consumer Duty's focus on evidencing outcomes and acting to prevent foreseeable harm.
Scaling Personalisation Across Millions of Members
The scale challenge is real. L&G supports millions of workplace pension members.
Personalisation at that scale cannot rely on manual comms planning. It needs an operating model that combines behavioural segmentation, real-time learning, and orchestration across channels.
L&G has also publicly reported surpassing £200 billion in DC assets and supporting 5.7 million members in its workplace DC schemes, illustrating the scale of the system these journeys need to serve.
That is why L&G invests in the foundations first. The firm has spent time building an engagement engine that can support personalisation.
Experiences like the pension app are also being relaunched with a broader purpose. Thanks to open finance, the app enables members to connect their various pensions and bank accounts, making it a place where planning tools throughout the lifetime savings journey can sit, and where customer intent can be understood through behaviour.
You cannot evaluate a channel in isolation. Firms need to understand how actions across different touchpoints connect over time.
You need to be able to test whether a change "over here" affects behaviour "over there" - and to interpret those results carefully, because real customer journeys are rarely linear.
Digital Journeys Must Hand Off Cleanly to Humans
Design for People, Not Channels
When do you hand off from digital to human support, and how do you stop the experience feeling disjointed?
The answer starts with the person behind the interaction. You do not design for "digital journeys" and separately design for "the call centre".
You design an end-to-end experience that feels coherent either way.
Make Sure Agents Can See the Journey
If a customer picks up the phone mid-journey, the agent should be able to see where they are.
The customer should not have to repeat information again and again. This is one of the simplest ways to create a smooth experience and ensure convenience.
It is also one of the most effective ways to build trust.
"Outcome-led engagement depends on more than what happens inside a portal or planner. Many regulated updates still reach customers by email, so whether someone opens, trusts, and acts on that message shapes the journey as much as the digital tool behind it."
Good regulated communications reduce friction, build confidence, and make the next step feel possible.
When firms design journeys around real behaviour, real moments, and real vulnerability, action follows more naturally.
And when action follows, better outcomes tend to follow too.
FAQs
What Does Outcome-Led Communications Mean in Financial Services?
It means designing and measuring communications based on whether they help customers take meaningful actions and reach better outcomes, rather than focusing only on opens or clicks.
Why Do Pensions Communications Often Fail to Drive Action?
Because complexity, emotional weight, and behavioural biases can make avoidance feel safer than engagement, even when information is technically complete.
Why Is Behavioural Insight More Useful Than Demographic Segmentation?
Demographics describe who someone is, but behavioural insight helps explain how they think, feel, and act. That makes it more effective for anticipating barriers and designing journeys that support action.
How Does Consumer Duty Affect Customer Communications?
Consumer Duty raises expectations that firms can evidence communications are clear, supportive, and contributing to good customer outcomes, particularly for vulnerable customers.
What Role Does Technology Play in Improving Engagement?
Technology helps deliver timely prompts, adapt journeys in real time, and measure whether customers are progressing, while still allowing clean hand-offs to human support when needed.
What Is One Practical Step Firms Can Take to Improve Engagement?
Start with one high-friction journey, define the customer outcome you want to support, and test small changes that reduce effort and make the next step clearer.
Sam Kendall works on digital marketing at Beyond Encryption, helping build B2B marketing activity around research, first principles, and sustainable growth. He writes about marketing effectiveness, positioning, customer communications, and digital culture, with longer-form work published at ATNL.
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Sam Kendall
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