How User Input is Driving Retirement Technology Innovation
Technology developed in a vacuum rarely works in the retirement space.
Real progress happens when the people who use the tools — advisors, sponsors, and participants — shape them. That’s why Ascensus’ development approach and post launch assessment begin not with features, but with your feedback.
- User-Driven Innovation: Ascensus designs retirement technology based on direct feedback from advisors, sponsors, and participants, ensuring practical and impactful solutions.
- Comprehensive Process: Insights from 1:1 interviews, workshops, usability testing, and the Client Effort Score (CES) drive continuous improvements and user-friendly designs.
- Collaborative Partnerships: By prioritizing user input, Ascensus creates smarter, more effective tools tailored to real-world needs, fostering meaningful advancements.
The feedback loop you deserve
Every enhancement at Ascensus is grounded in real user insight, because we know meaningful technology innovation comes from collaboration. After all, who knows your business better than you?
Ultimately, this cooperative mindset led to the creation of a rigorous and continuous input cycle, built on “qualitative and quantitative" feedback, collected through various channels that include:
- Direct 1:1 Interviews
- Workshops
- Usability Testing
- Client Effort Score (CES)
With these methods and other research tools, we can better understand your needs before we build, validate solutions as we develop, and ensure ease and value well after launch.
Inside access via 1:1 interviews
Advisor, sponsor and participant interviews should go beyond a simple Q&A. So, by setting up test scenarios and prototype environments, we can combine interviews with concept testing to ensure we are moving in the right direction and meeting the end user’s needs and goals.
This process reveals how subjects candidly feel about a product or service, as well as practical aspects – like how users move through a workflow, where their attention goes, what slows users down, and what they work around. This more exhaustive approach often surfaces insights and themes that standardized customer surveys can’t quite capture.
User input helped ease payroll pains
As an example, during our payroll system research, the direct interviews confirmed specific friction points in the workflow. Those insights informed our design, which reduced manual work and gave users immediate clarity, with 99.5% of files submitted in good order during the test period and a Client Effort Score of 4+ out of 5, with 5 being the easiest.
Workshops offer collective insight
Our research methodology also includes strategic group workshops to gather insights from advisors and sponsors, giving us a clear view of where themes converge across firms, roles, and processes. These sessions are invaluable in identifying broader patterns like challenges with disconnected systems, onboarding gaps, or unclear workflows that help us prioritize what matters most for users across the retirement ecosystem.
“It’s great to see and hear our partners in a high energy setting, like our workshops,” says Rose McGroarty, Senior Vice President, Digital Experience. “You can feel their passion—and see exactly what frustrates them. This energizes us too and translates into solutions that genuinely support their work.”
This perspective directly shapes our approach around integration and connectivity, especially where advisors repeatedly highlighted duplicated effort across CRMs, onboarding, and administrative systems.
Usability tests yield hard data
As features are developed or enhanced, we also bring users back to test them. This is not about checking for bugs; it is about validating the flow. Does the language make sense? Is the process intuitive?
At its core, usability testing shows us:
- Where do users hesitate
- Which steps cause confusion
- How intuitive is the design
This stage prevents us from building roads that lead to the wrong destination. For instance, let’s say we are updating a system so users can better correct errors. Usability testing may reveal that improved real-time editing capabilities may be helpful. Once identified, we can more easily adjust the design and ensure the final product is as user friendly as possible on day one.
Client scores measure from friction to flow
One of the most important outcomes of embracing user input is our recently rolled out Client Effort Score (CES). This helps measure how easy it is for advisors, plan sponsors, and participants to complete essential tasks across our platforms. The CES appears at pivotal moments—such as onboarding, reporting, payroll, enrollment, and transactions—inviting quick, real-time feedback.
The form’s simple format makes it easy for users to share immediate, practical insights, and the strong response rate shows that clients value both being heard and the ease of providing feedback.
Listening leads to better outcomes
The Client Effort Score transforms feedback into targeted improvements, streamlining processes, reducing barriers, and increasing efficiency where it matters.
Engagement with the Client Effort Score has been impressively high, with approximately 60% participation based on over 300,000 responses. So far, CES feedback has been overwhelmingly positive, highlighting both the platform’s usability and strength of our collaboration with partners. This level of engagement underscores our core philosophy: Listening fuels change, and every voice counts as we work together toward real, measurable progress.
Building smarter partnerships – together
Ascensus’ user-centric feedback cycle ensures that our technology is not only powerful, but practical, tailored to the needs of advisors, sponsors, and participants. By partnering with us, you gain more than innovative tools; you gain a collaborator who listens, values your input, and turns it into meaningful advancements. Whether through workshops or quick feedback, your voice drives real progress.
To learn more, contact us to see how your voice can shape smarter, more effective retirement solutions.