Transamerica Retirement Solutions operates in an increasingly competitive space in which participants are expecting and demanding speed, agility, easy to use interfaces, and technology driven customer service. However, it seems like in reality TRS is ultimately competing on cost, selling itself on a minimally lower fee structure to plan sponsors to manage their DC plans, not knowledge, capability, ease of doing business with, or other competitive advantages that its competitors have invested in to attract business. Let’s say they aren’t the Nordstrom or Macys or even the JC Penny of the defined contribution recordkeeping industry...they’re the Ross. And internally, they seem quite satisfied to maintain that position and continue to operate with the difficulties that come along with it. Despite rapidly changing expectations from participants and plan sponsors to provide capabilities in line with today’s mobile, app and tech based business environment, they keep running on old, dated workflow and CRM systems from the 1990’s that create an outsized amount of problems and issues for transaction processing. The cumbersome nature of the systems can cause misinformation and long delays to participants, who ultimately become frusterated and then enraged that something as simple as receiving a small distribution from an old employers plan can sometimes take weeks and require things be sent multiple times. The workflow system most of the enterprise uses, AWD, is perhaps the most confusing, tedious, and problematic workflow system in existence. For many call center reps, AWD won’t load or display documents they need to view to communicate accurate information-it just crashes and requires the rep to open Windows task manager and end the program. This is a problem that tech support has been aware of for a year but doesn’t seem to know how to fix. Perhaps the problem lies in the fact that over the years Transamerica has modified AWD so much that the developer who created it doesn’t want to support it anymore. AWD’s layout prevents reps from being able to ascertain where a NIGO item is in the process of being resolved, who has touched it, who needs to do something on it, whether certain functional tasks have been completed, and what needs to be done for it to get finished. Work is handled in a dated, que based process with no cross-functional processing whatsoever. When something comes in, it gets kicked from one internal que to another. If it’s not in good order, the processor creates a new work item for a different que to do something, which usually doesn’t get done. Participants call in to check why its taking so long, and Customer Care Reps often can’t tell whats going on and default to telling the customer its still in process and everything is fine. Also, TRS has instituted an extremely low compensation structure despite the complexities of what it takes to do the job correctly, and aren’t exactly paying CC Reps enough to care to fix something for a participant. The metrics they use actually punish reps for taking the time to help and do whats needed to fix problems. When a rep who has the experience to know what they are doing does reach out to other departments to try get things done, a spiraling negative feedback loop has developed at times between different departments who are involved in processing based on who needs to do what. I chalk this up to everyone at Transamerica being overwhelmed and subject to unfriendly systems. Upper management keeps saying they are “creating a culture of transformation and are future fit”, except they don’t invest in new systems to actually follow through on the change they keep talking about. Middle management, many of whom have only worked at Transamerica in Cedar Rapids their whole career and don’t have functional industry experience outside of the company, seem to be fighting against the tide of change, and don’t want to move away from utilizing harsh, dated call metrics to measure individual employee performance and judge merit, which in reality do a poor to nonexistant job of measuring behaviors that actually matter to participants/customers. Team managers in the call center do everything in their power to avoid taking ownership of an issue, and don’t seem to desire to or even be capable of facilitating reaching out to other divisions and working together to break down inefficient processes or bottlenecks. A culture of “passing the buck” exists among team managers here like I have never seen before. Ultimately, if they do end up speaking to a participant, they fall back on apologizing to customers or reviewing recordings of previous calls, not taking action, and seem overwhelmed and unwilling to do anything of substance to resolve NIGO’s caused by internally flawed processes or incorrect information provided by inexperienced reps. My experience as a whole is that it’s a Harvard Business Review worthy case study on how NOT to run a 21st century operation, and instead how to stay stuck in inefficient bad processes while marketing yourself as a viable competitor to Fidelity, TIAA, and Empower when in fact you’re 10 years behind them in processes and capabilities. Would it really be so hard to do something as simple as redesigning forms to be clearer or creating automatic notifications that don’t confuse and perplex the customer and make them feel like they need to call in for clarification? Transamerica seems to have a cultural ego complex that focuses on generating and disseminating positive propoganda painting themselves in a positive light, and although run on a low cost, low resource availability mentality, seem to think it’s a good idea to pay someone to review and reply to every post on here and rebut feedback about what the existing issues really are, and instead spin it with a “we have changed for the better and are focused on being this and this” when the reality of the situation is quite the contrary. Maybe they should create an internal system for improving business processes incorporating employee feedback before they leave, instead of forcing them to rely on outlets like Glassdoor and then rebutting good feedback they put on here.
