No regrets despite lack of engagement

Australian governments would be wrong to underestimate the favourable regard in which Australians hold superannuation as an investment, according to new research. 

The research, released this week by the Fund Executives Association (FEAL) has found that while Australians might not actually engage with their superannuation, the overwhelming majority have no regrets about actually investing in super.  

The research, the 2014 Net Promoter Score Survey, is an annual joint initiative of FEAL, Customer Service Benchmarking Australia (CSBA) and Melbourne Business School (MBS) and is now in its seventh year. 

The research is designed to benchmark member satisfaction with their super fund by assigning each fund a net promoter score based on responses collated from over 4,500 interviews with fund members twice a year. 

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According to FEAL, the difference in the July 2014 survey was that additional questions around the subject of 'regret' were added to the Survey by Professor Don O'Sullivan, Associate Professor of Marketing, and Ujwal Kayande, Professor of Marketing, at MBS. 

O'Sullivan pointed to the fact that most people do not make an active decision to join a super fund with 68 per cent ending up in the default fund, and only 13 per cent following recommendations. "Engagement with super is incredibly low," he said. "In fact, most Australians do not apply a rational decision-making process to their choices about super, they give it about as much thought as buying a bar of chocolate, and unless something goes horrifically wrong, their on-going strategy could best be described as set-and-forget." 

"That's why we chose to ask questions about regret, to find out what Australians ultimately think about the outcome of super choices that, due to their own inaction, are made for them by others." 

Professor Kayande said that regret was revealed to be so low as to be negligible, and lowest of all among older Australians. 

When it came to the differences between members with default and customised super options, the survey found that levels of regret across both groups were extremely low.