wfn.org | Pension board sees progress in resolving service problems

[NewsDesk <NewsDesk@UMCOM.UMC.ORG>]

July 22, 1998        Contact: Tim Tanton*(615)742-5470*Nashville, Tenn.
10-71B{434}

NOTE: This story may be used as a sidebar to UMNS #433. 

EVANSTON, Ill. (UMNS) - The churchwide agency in charge of providing
pension and benefits to retired United Methodist clergy and lay
employees is approaching the end of its service crisis issues, according
to its top executive.

The churchwide Board of Pension and Health Benefits has been working
intensely on overcoming its customer service problems, bringing records
and accounts up to date. That has involved major conversions in its
data-processing systems and "debugging" its procedures for handling
information.

"We are significantly through the debugging process," said Barbara
Boigegrain, the agency's top staff executive, in an interview following
the board's July 20-21 meeting. Some items remain, and the agency is
working through a backlog of information that must be processed.

"We are about three-quarters through our service crisis issues,"
Boigegrain said.

However, she said, bills and statements will be going out to
participants in August, and she expects a lot of calls as a result.
People will have a heightened sensitivity, she said, and they will be
looking at a new plan and a new type of statement.

In March, Boigegrain put the agency in crisis mode in an effort to deal
with its customer service problems. The board's staff had been deluged
with phone calls since converting to a new investment plan in January.

"We are moving out of that crisis mode," Boigegrain said July 21. She
defined crisis as "being overwhelmed by customer demand and not meeting
our customer expectations."

"We (are moving) into a problem-solving mode, where we will continue to
identify problems and solve them, but we will have the ability to focus
staff on those issues and get those problems resolved," she said. They
will be past the point where the phones are completely overwhelmed, she
said.

"I don't want to fully say we're at an end because we have August to go
through with the new statements out," she added. "I believe that we will
be challenged to stay on top of workflow through August and into
September."

After that point, the agency will have marked nine months since the
conversion and will have addressed the major customer service issues,
she said.

Boigegrain said she plans to invite the benefits officers from all the
annual (regional) conferences to a meeting at the end of August to
discuss their top concerns.

On the financial front, the pension agency marked another milestone
recently, exceeding $11 billion in assets as of July 16. 

That represented an increase from $10.8 billion as of May 31, and $8.9
billion on May 31, 1997, according to F. Gale Whitson-Schmidt, treasurer
and chief financial officer.

"The market has been extremely strong," she explained. "We have very
good investment managers. We have an excellent investment committee."

The agency's diversified investment fund, which represents its largest
pool of investment dollars, returned 11.87 percent for the first six
months of this year, said John English, chairman of the board's
investment committee. For the last 12 months ended June 30, the fund had
a 20.39 percent return.

"We are in the first quartile of pension funds with over $1 billion in
assets," English stated.

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