Introduction

The Pensions Regulator (TPR) is the UK regulator of work-based pension schemes. TPR work to ensure that pension schemes are adequately funded and run in the best interests of retirement savers. This involves verifying that employers meet their obligations by enrolling staff into a pension scheme and making contributions.

The introduction of mandatory workplace pensions and the auto-enrolment scheme has resulted in challenges for the digital team at TPR. With the increasing amount of content on their site and the growth in engagements, they needed a service that could constantly assess the quality, availability and performance of their site.

TPR use the Sitemorse service as part of their overall digital strategy, to provide a high quality online experience for their audiences.

Over the past few years TPR has been working on a detailed programme of change with the aim of producing consistent, long term and sustained improvement in their website quality. Sitemorse monitoring has helped to demonstrate that while this work has been happening, the results have been improving.

Rob Thompson, Web Content Manager at TPR said:
“Our consistently strong results in the Central Government INDEX are something we’re very proud of. It’s also a helpful message to relay to stakeholders and suppliers about the in-house digital expertise that exists within TPR. Although we measure our performance in a number of ways – including direct customer feedback – Sitemorse remains a key performance indicator for us. We use Sitemorse to monitor the quality of our coding and content, accessibility, SEO and overall performance. It’s useful to see how we compare to other organisations, in both the public and private sectors. We could see that the improvements that we made were measurable and therefore making a difference to our overall scores and ranking in the UK Central Government INDEX.”

TPR consider Sitemorse to be an important independent benchmark of quality. They want to provide a high quality online experience, it is therefore important that they can demonstrate to internal and external stakeholders this is what they are actually doing. Sitemorse enables them to do this.

TPR constantly review their web presence to ensure that it’s meeting the needs of their audiences – such as employers working to meet their automatic enrolment duties, or pensions professionals seeking guidance. Sitemorse plays an important role in verifying that their site is optimised as fully as it can be for all audiences.

“As a Government website, we have a legal requirement to meet Level AA of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0. Sitemorse reports help us to identify and prioritise areas of our digital estate to focus our efforts on.”
Rob Thompson, Web Content Manager at TPR

The Sitemorse results have also helped provide TPR with added confidence while their website has undergone a number of significant design and technical updates. They introduced a new responsive design for mobile users. This is particularly important to their small and micro employer audiences, where usage of mobile devices to access their online services continues to increase significantly. Sitemorse help The Pensions Regulator to get the basics right.

“We all know from our own online experiences that if a website is performing slowly you’re less likely to use it, which could have a detrimental effect on our call centre. Furthermore, if a website contains lots of broken links, spelling mistakes or grammatical errors the consequences can be more serious for a brand, with users losing trust in who we are and what we do.”
Rob Thompson, Web Content Manager at TPR