Modernizing Member Services Knowledge at a Large Public Pension System

A large public pension system in the Midwestern U.S. responsible for retirement benefits for state and local public-sector employees and retirees needed to modernize their member services knowledge. With roughly 500 employees and 220 Bloomfire users at launch, its Benefits and Member Services teams depend on accurate, instantly accessible procedures to serve members consistently across complex retirement, disability, and survivor benefit programs.

When a member calls about a pension calculation, a disability claim, or survivor benefits, the answer has to be right the first time, and staff need to find it while the member is still on the line.

Challenges Faced

This pension system’s Benefits team relies on roughly 700 PDF-based manuals and standard operating procedures (SOPs) to answer detailed member questions accurately. As the organization looked to modernize, it set out to make that knowledge faster to find, easier to maintain, and safe to scale. 

But the systems holding that knowledge had grown slowly over time, and they were working against the team rather than for it. Here are some challenges the teams faced:

• Member services knowledge lived in split repositories (an unsupported on-premises SharePoint site and SharePoint Online), with weak search and limited metadata and reporting. Staff had to check more than one place to be confident they had the current version.
• Staff were used to browsing menus and scrolling within very large PDFs, and links between documents had to be maintained by hand. Every new or retired procedure meant more manual cleanup.
• There was no robust process for reviewing and updating content, leading to duplicate and outdated materials. Without clear ownership, no one could say with certainty which version was the source of truth.
• Sensitive internal procedures needed to stay separated by role and department, and any AI answers had to come only from vetted, authorized content.

The team needed two things: a new place to store files, and a system that would make the right answer easy to find and keep that answer accurate over time.

How Bloomfire Helped

After a formal RFP process in which Bloomfire earned the highest evaluation ranking, the organization partnered with Bloomfire to build a single, governed knowledge hub, starting with its Benefits division and a phased go-live that kept risk low and adoption high. The team migrated and organized 900+ pieces of content, cut uncategorized items from roughly 400 to 37 ahead of launch, and trained internal advocates to lead end-user training. 

• Unified AI search (Synapse) that returns a direct answer plus matching documents from one search box, with OCR to surface text inside image-based PDFs. Now, staff no longer need to know which manual holds the answer before they start looking.
• Structured content governance with centralized ownership by the quality and training team, moderator approval before publishing, annual curation reminders, and learner flagging of outdated posts. Content stays current instead of drifting out of date after launch.
• Analytics and reporting segmented by division, area, and department, with API-driven dashboards and weekly trend reviews to guide ongoing coaching and content improvements.

Conclusion

Adoption is well above Bloomfire customer benchmarks. In the first weeks after launch, 80% of the Benefits team moved quickly from legacy menus and PDF scrolling to asking questions in plain language. For a team accustomed to navigating menus and long documents, that shift happened remarkably fast. And because content and coaching improved, 99% of AI questions were answered from vetted content.

The program shows that strong governance, phased rollout, and data-driven enablement can turn a content migration into a lasting change in how frontline teams find answers. The organization is now preparing to open the platform to additional parts of the business, building on the foundation laid with Benefits.