With the superannuation industry already beset by negative headlines about member services, the last thing it needed was a Super Consumers Australia “mystery shopper” study into the quality of customer service provided by 20 super fund call centres.  
 
Super Consumers Australia commissioned Customer Service Benchmarking Australia (CSBA) to make 1000 “mystery shopper” calls to the call centres of 20 large funds, posing as prospective members, relatives of members from non-English speaking backgrounds, and members in hardship seeking early release. The resulting study found some funds struggled to even answer calls, while call centre agents “failed to take ownership for solving problems” or “routinely failed to show care and empathy”. 
 
AustralianSuper and Team Super reportedly answered so few calls that their “performance was not able to be assessed in a reliable way” (AustralianSuper, for its part, says that the study was conducted while it was transitioning to a new call centre provider, with customer satisfactions scores now “the highest they’ve ever been” and average speed of answer now at less than two minutes).  
 
But while the study is seemingly of a piece with the other investigations and reviews carried out by regulators and consumer advocates, there are some aspects of it that demand closer scrutiny.  
 
The scenario that generated the worst results in the study was a caller in difficult personal circumstances seeking early release of their super. The report criticises agents for terminating these calls once identity could not be verified, without offering guidance on eligibility or process. 
 
Here is one quote it offers up: “After saying my mother is dying and I need money to go and see her in Europe, the response was ‘Ok can you spell your surname?’” 
 
Setting aside that this was not a real request – that CBSA did not put an actual, emotionally-distressed member on deck for this call – should the agent not have carried out basic identity checks? Or would it be better that they succumbed to the sort of emotive deception routinely used to siphon money from financial institutions all around the world?  
 
Consider what the past two years have looked like from inside a fund’s risk function. The $1 billion Shield and First Guardian collapses have seen thousands of Australians stripped of their savings by sophisticated, high-pressure operations, while last year’s credential stuffing attacks turned member-facing channels into an attack surface overnight. Hardship and early release claims are precisely where fraudsters concentrate, because urgency and distress are the tools of social engineering as much as they are markers of genuine need.  
 
An agent who declines to progress an unverifiable early release enquiry is not failing the member but executing the controls that regulators, boards and – not incidentally – consumer advocates demanded after each of those failures.  
 
Of course, that doesn’t excuse other aspects of the report. Four callers reporting they were laughed at is four too many, whatever the sample size. The finding that 58 per cent of agents pushed responsibility back onto the English-speaking relatives of non-English speaking members, and that only one fund offered an interpreter through its phone menu, suggests a gap that funds should close without waiting to be told.  
 
Still, funds have been asking for the same thing the SCA wants: clear, mandatory service standards. The government committed to them some time ago and has yet to release anything for consultation. Australians deserve funds that answer the phone and treat callers as human beings. They also deserve funds that do not release their savings to whoever sounds distressed enough. Funds and members need service standards that deal with both.