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As a retirement plan sponsor, your role is to provide a plan that boosts and facilitates your employees’ ability to retire with confidence. Part of doing this lies in your responsibility to find a quality retirement plan service provider that you can trust and rely on.
When you have worked with the same provider for an extended period, it is easy to allow inertia to take over and maintain the mindset of “if it’s not broken, don’t fix it.” Sure, keeping well-oiled machines in place when they are doing their job can be a great way of approaching your business as it is not unreasonable to avoid initiating change just for the sake of it.
However, taking a moment every now and then to ensure retirement plan providers continue to offer current and efficient services can be critical to providing your employees with the retirement support they deserve.
What Should You Look for in Your Retirement Plan Service Providers?
Working with the right retirement plan service provider helps your committee ensure:
- smooth plan administration and maintenance
- quality investment options
- reasonable expenses
- a positive experience for participants
However, it can be difficult to know what to look for in a provider in order to ensure they are the best fit for your needs. When looking into your retirement plan providers, you will want to ensure that they:
Make the Experience Personal
Each and every retirement plan’s needs will differ from the next. That makes personalization an important offering from your provider. A quality provider understands this and will work to help provide your plan with appropriate products and services.
Your providers should be taking steps to engage your participants, helping to ensure they achieve a meaningful retirement. From plan education to investment guidance, and everything in between — your participants should have access to a plan with the ability to align with their goals.
Your providers should also actively work to engage you, the plan sponsor. You should receive proactive communication and assistance in addressing topical issues or concerns regarding your plan. This way, you can regularly work together to build a plan that meets the needs of both your employees and your organization.
On top of this, every organization appreciates results and a way to measure progress without having additional tasks added to their workload.
Provide a Quality Service Relationship
The quality of your provider’s service plays a significant role in the plan you are able to offer to your participants. When evaluating the effectiveness of your retirement plan service provider, take a moment to reflect on the following:
- Have some concerns presented themselves in your partnership?
- Are those concerns impacting the quality of the service your provider is delivering to you?
- How well do the individuals responsible for handling your relationship work with your organization?
Offer Digestible Plan Reviews
Your providers should be delivering digestible information for you to act on. However, some may just be providing you with reporting that is inundated with difficult-to-understand information, leaving you confused and struggling to make informed decisions. This can prove to be more harmful than no reporting at all, so be sure you are able to understand the information that’s being provided.
Boost Your Participants’ Experiences
The experience of your plan participants is paramount. Just how much is your provider able to help you boost the participant experience? When employees become disengaged from the retirement plan, it’s important to listen to the feedback you receive. Patterns or trends can often emerge as a result of their experiences with the provider’s:
- meetings
- statements
- website
- and more
Take a moment to explore your employees’ opinions on their experience with your provider. This could help you discover valuable insight into the quality of their services.
Offer Investment Reporting with a Side of Advice
Investment reporting is a critical part of your provider’s duties. However, these reports often only provide you with information, lacking in a definitive opinion on your next steps. A report telling you that a fund is in the bottom quartile certainly paints a grim picture but doesn’t advise you on whether or not it should be removed as an option for your plan.
This is where investment advice comes in. When a provider elevates their reports to include both information and specific advice on your path forward, you can make decisions about your plan with greater confidence. While there can be a fine line between reporting and advice, there is a distinct difference in the service you receive and the protection you are afforded.
The Importance of Issuing a Request for Proposal (RFP)
While changing service providers is typically the result of a failure of one or more of the above factors, periodically issuing an RFP (request for proposal) can provide valuable information regarding what plan sponsors should expect in the current market environment. It also provides documentation of the due diligence required for all service providers. If this process has not been completed for several years, we recommend plan sponsors consider taking advantage of this valuable process, which can often provide unexpected benefits.
SWBC is Here for You
Want to learn more about how you can effectively evaluate your retirement plan service provider? Our experts at SWBC Retirement Plan Services dive deeper into this subject with the following video. Watch it now: [link]
Are you ready to evaluate your plan providers? We understand that tasks like conducting an RFP can be overwhelming and intimidating, which is why SWBC stands ready to help. We can make this endeavor easy by managing your search and guiding your organization through the entire process. Contact us today by calling 866.270.4874 or visiting swbc.com/retirement-plan-services.
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