Plan sponsors of and participants in deferred compensation plans provided by Nationwide Retirement Solutions will soon begin seeing big changes. For more than a year, Nationwide has been rebuilding www.nrsforu.com to deliver a faster, easier web experience. The changes are expected to be implemented this spring.

According to Eric Stevenson, vice president of sales for Nationwide Retirement Solutions, the site’s improved design reduces clutter, eliminates long text blocks, and improves usability. “We want our website to make it easy for participants to more quickly find what they’re looking for and understand more readily what they’re looking at.”

Stevenson says Nationwide’s user-experience team recruited independent users and participants and watched them interact with the solutions being built.

“What we found was that users tend to ignore big blocks of text. They scan headlines, topics and links for key words or phrases. When that doesn’t work, they give up and return to the Search box. It’s time-consuming and can be frustrating.”

Stevenson adds that each page was reworked to make it much more user-friendly.

Learning Center Greatly Improved

There’s a lot to the online Learning Center that’s new. It features more content that’s better written and organized. What isn’t new has been improved. The idea, Stevenson says, is to help public employees understand retirement planning, investing for the long term and the basics of deferred compensation plan participation.

Nationwide has developed a new “mindsets” collection to replace the current age-range selector for information. “These mindsets allow public employees to self-select the kind of participant they are, based on investor profile and comfort with retirement preparation. It’s an easier and more accurate way to get retirement planning ideas for a user’s individual situation.”

“We want to help participants feel more confident about making informed decisions,” he says.

Stevenson adds that getting help is easier and more encouraged. The site offers plenty of new contact prompts that suggest how a user can talk to a specialist.

Video Tells the Story

Nationwide produced a short educational video that offers a tour of what’s coming. The video explains not only what’s changing but the logic behind the changes, so participants can better understand where they’ll find information they’re looking for.

“We encourage plan sponsors to watch the video and become familiar with the changes so they can help promote the all-new website to their employees,” Stevenson says.

In addition to the video, Nationwide is producing a series of promotional materials designed to alert public employees that their plan website has been improved, and to encourage them to take a test drive.

Sponsor Services Also Enhanced

Nationwide is upgrading the plan sponsor web experience as well.

“Based on plan sponsor research, we are creating a website for public employers that delivers better functionality, improved reporting and an easier user experience.”

A new dashboard organizes content for them, allowing for more enhanced reporting and quick, easy access to data points.

Tabs are organized to include the content most needed and relevant to plan sponsors, making it easier for them to find what they want and need.

The participant search function gives plan sponsors the ability to view participant information while still logged in as a plan sponsor. While they cannot make transactions, they are able to see what the participant sees, to help the participant resolve a challenge they may have as they manage their account.

The new plan sponsor Web address is www.nrsforu.com/plansponsor.

Get More Information

For more information about Nationwide’s enhanced web services for public sector retirement plans, contact your Nationwide representative or call 877.496.1630.