Despite being seen as a metric for engagement, superannuation fund members checking their balance does not necessarily indicate engagement, instead it likely signifies a member is exiting a fund, an analyst believes.
Analytics specialist Empirics, reported that demand for member retention had seen super funds increasingly take up their predictive analytics software.
Empirics CEO Darrell Ludowyke said, "We're seeing a real surge of interest from funds who are moving on from reporting, which essentially looks backwards, to using predictive analytics to look forwards and see what these insights can do for their fund, particularly how they can engage and retain members".
Ludowyke said the move from straight data reporting to predictive analytics has shown that previously perceived notions of members interacting with their fund as an indicator of greater engagement was flawed.
"We've all got super fund logins and it may be that a member hasn't used theirs for five years and suddenly they're on there four times in four weeks, what does that indicate?
Some may see it as greater engagement but when we know everything else that's going on that allows us to identify well no they're actually getting their account balance because they're going to roll out shortly."
Empirics has found that customer retention was the main concern of super funds, Ludowyke stating it was the main driver of fund CEOs signing up to their services
"We literally had people say ‘if you do just that it's worth it. If you can do just save me members then I'm very, very interested'," Luowyke commented on super fund CEO interest in predictive analytics.
