CPG

Overview

Founded in 1917, Church Pension Group (CPG) is a separately incorporated financial services organization that serves the Episcopal Church. With more than $13 billion in assets, it serves to provide retirement, health, life insurance, and related benefits for its clergy and lay employees.

CPG approached my team with the large undertaking of tackling their member and administrator portal experience. They wanted to help empower employee members by allowing self-service on tasks such as annual benefits enrollment. A major portion of the project was also consolidating the functionality of separate web apps into one, and understanding different admin types and needs.

My Role

I served as the lead designer on the project. To best serve their team and the project, I had to deeply immerse myself in their organization’s complex business rules and existing app functionality. Once I had a grasp of their different applications and user types, I was able to design a robust system of pages and components for their employee and admin experiences.

Features I designed included:

• Admin Dashboard

• Member Dashboard

• New Hire Enrollment

• Annual Enrollment Management

• Employee Information Management

• Institution Management

• Benefits Management

• Pension Management

Discovery

Understanding the Users

In order to inform the information architecture of both the member and admin experience, I had to understand the tasks they needed to complete using CPG’s services.

CPG members use their online portal to perform tasks such as:

• Review their benefits

• Review their pension details

• Review employment details

• Review and update their profile information

• Add dependents

• Update their marital status

• Annually update their benefits or update them mid-year due to a life-changing event

CPG has three types of administrators that use their services, each with their own specific role needs.

• Institution admins need the ability to:

  • Search and access employee profiles

  • Search institutions if they have more than one

  • Update institution details

  • Add or update employment and compensation

• Group admins are responsible for managing the health and life benefits of participants within the benefits groups they manage. They need the ability to:

  • Search and access participant information

  • Update benefits on behalf of participants

  • Update annual enrollment on behalf of participants

  • Search and access billing account information

• Diocesan admins have the ability to complete tasks that are available to both Institution and Group admins

Understanding Current State Tools and Tasks

I was given access to test accounts for the different types of web apps admins had to walk through and understand how certain tasks were being performed. Understanding the current state experience helped me translate these pieces of segmented functionality into a consolidated environment.

Setting up the Design System

Using some established brand elements CPG had such as type and color, I developed a design system to account for common needs within their online portal. None of CPG’s existing applications were responsive, so designing for small, medium, and large device screen sizes was also something I needed to be mindful of throughout the project.

Improving Portal Dashboard Experience

MyCPG Member Portal

Based on my learnings of what information members most commonly logged in to access, I worked with CPG engineers to surface important member profile details at a glance. Members can now access their profile details from their laptop, tablet, or phone.

My Administrator Portal (MAP)

For the admin portal, we provided functionality that would allow admins to search for specific actions. Default actions were based on administrator input, recording what tasks they most commonly sought to complete. 

New Hire Enrollment

MyCPG Member Portal

Adding a new employee to one’s institution was one of the many tasks that I had to account for within the administrator environment. I had to be mindful of a couple common scenarios admins encounter when trying to add a new employee:

• The admin could have more than 1 institution they manage

• The employee may already have a profile record with CPG’s system

  • CPG noted admins would often accidentally create duplicate records that would later have to be consolidated by internal staff

• If the admin was a diocesan admin, they could also set up benefits for the new hire

To help with the issue of record duplication, I designed a solution that would inform the admin if there was a match based on a combination of identifying information (first name, last name, date of birth, or social security number). In this case, the admin is prompted to select an existing profile. However, we needed to retain the ability to continue with a new record in case the match is not the person the admin is attempting to add. 

Change Log

The change log was a feature that previously had only existed in the group administrator tool. Its purpose is to allow admins to review a history of changes to participants within their benefits groups. Within the new CPG admin portal, my team and I were able to extend this functionality to institution admins, allowing them to view changes applied to members of their institutions.

It was important to be mindful of the admin role context when designing this feature. Institution admins care about events such as position or salary changes. Group admins care about details such as if a participant has had a change in coverage, marital status, or dependents.

Outcome

Church Pension Group’s portal project is quite large and therefore has more phases and releases to come. However, just within its first couple of releases, the following outcomes have been reported:

• Duplicate record occurrences have virtually disappeared since the match solution was implemented.

• Admins have commented on how working within one consolidated tool has reduced the time it takes to complete tasks compared to having to log into 2-3 separate tools.

• Members have provided positive feedback on being given more self-service capabilities on tasks such as updating benefits and coverage.

  • Opening more tasks to members has also begun to help in providing CPG with more complete employee record information.