Ascensus puts plan sponsors at the heart of progress regarding retirement technology innovation and administration.

Along with advisors, third party administrators, and participants, plan sponsors are the users who ensure systems truly meet the evolving needs of all involved. When the voices of plan sponsors and employers lead the conversation, everyone benefits, from front-line administration to overall participant outcomes.

Key Points

• User-Driven Retirement Technology: Ascensus designs retirement technology based on direct feedback from advisors, sponsors, and participants, ensuring practical and impactful solutions.
• It’s Comprehensive & Ongoing: Insights from one-on-one interviews, workshops, usability testing, and the Client Effort Score (CES) drive continuous employer-centric improvements and user-friendly designs.
• Better Experiences, Built Together: By prioritizing your input, Ascensus creates smarter, more effective tools tailored to real-world needs, fostering meaningful advancements.

The Impact of Plan Sponsors on Ascensus Retirement Technology

Ascensus starts with feedback – not features. That’s why every enhancement we develop and ultimately roll out is grounded in real insight from the teams using our platforms and tools. Whether for advisors, employers, or participants, by prioritizing user input through interviews with employers, workshops, usability testing, and near-constant measurement, we create retirement technology that works the way you and your employees want it to work

Your feedback drives the next generation of retirement planning.

Innovation in the retirement industry begins with collaboration. After all, who understands your workflows better than the employers and employees who use it?

This mindset led Ascensus to build a rigorous and continuous input cycle that gathers both qualitative and quantitative feedback through:

• Direct 1:1 Interviews
• Workshops
• Usability Testing
• Client Effort Score (CES)

These methods help us understand your team’s needs before we build, validate retirement solutions as we develop them, and ensure ease and value long after launch. This collaborative approach strengthens advisor and sponsor collaboration while improving retirement system workflows across payroll, onboarding, and ongoing administration

One-on-one employer interviews

Interviews with advisors, participants, and retirement plan sponsors in particular go beyond simple Q&A sessions. By setting up test scenarios and prototype environments, we combine interviews with concept testing to confirm we're moving in the right direction and meeting real goals.

This process reveals how employers candidly feel about a product or service. It also exposes practical details—how users move through a workflow, where their attention shifts, what slows them down, and what they work around. This exhaustive approach to plan sponsor technology often surfaces insights that standardized surveys often miss.

For example, during payroll integration research, direct interviews confirmed specific friction points within their workflows. Those insights informed a more user-centered redesign that reduced manual work and gave users immediate clarity. During the test period, 99.5 percent of files were submitted in good order, and the Client Effort Score averaged more than four out of five, with five being the easiest.

Plan sponsor workshops deliver an enhanced digital experience

Another part of Ascensus’ sponsor feedback retirement system is our strategic group workshops, which gather insights from the people managing payroll and retirement benefits across firms. These sessions reveal where challenges converge—disconnected systems, onboarding gaps, unclear workflows, and help us prioritize what matters most across your team’s retirement ecosystem.

“It’s great to see and hear our partners in a high energy setting, like our workshops,” says Rose McGroarty, Senior Vice President, Digital Experience. “You can feel their passion—and see exactly what frustrates them. This energizes us too and translates into solutions that genuinely support their work.”

This perspective directly shapes our approach to retirement technology integration and connectivity, especially when employers repeatedly highlight shared challenges regarding, onboarding, payroll, participant engagement, compliance, and other administrative platforms.

Usability testing of the latest retirement plan technology

As features are developed or enhanced for employers and retirement plan administrators, we bring users like you back to test them. This isn't about checking for bugs. It's about validating the flow for you and your team. Does the language make sense? Is the process intuitive?

Usability testing shows us:

• Where users hesitate
• Which steps cause confusion
• How intuitive the design really is

This stage prevents us from building roads that lead to the wrong destination. For instance, while updating a system to help your team correct errors more easily to ensure compliance, usability testing may reveal that improved real-time editing capabilities would be helpful. Once identified, we can adjust the design and ensure the final product is as user-friendly as possible from day one.

Client effort scores measure ease & efficiency

One of the most important outcomes of embracing sponsor input into your workflow is the Client Effort Score (CES). This metric measures how easy it is for the people managing payroll and benefits, and participants to complete essential tasks across our platforms.

The CES appears at pivotal moments—such as onboarding, reporting, payroll, enrollment, and transactions—inviting quick, real-time feedback. The simple format makes it easy to share immediate, practical insights, and the strong response rate shows that clients value both being heard and the ease of providing feedback.

Why listening to plan sponsors leads to success 

As you can imagine, the Client Effort Score has been vital to transforming feedback into targeted improvements, streamlining processes, reducing barriers, and increasing efficiency where it matters.

Engagement with the CES has been impressively high, with approximately 60 percent participation based on more than 300,000 responses. Feedback has been overwhelmingly positive, highlighting both the platform's usability and the strength of our collaboration. This level of engagement underscores our core philosophy with respect to working with plan sponsors and employers on their retirement plan journey: Listening fuels change, and every voice counts as we work toward real, measurable progress.

Advancing retirement technology & building better partnerships with plan sponsors

Ascensus' user-centric feedback cycle ensures that our retirement plan technology is not only powerful, but practical—tailored to the needs of the people managing payroll and benefits, and the participants who rely on their retirement plans.

By partnering with Ascensus, you gain more than innovative tools. You gain a collaborator who listens, values your input, and turns it into meaningful advancements.

Whether through workshops, usability testing, or quick CES feedback, your voice drives real progress. To learn more, contact us to see how your insights can shape smarter, more effective retirement solutions.