Further information on the pensions survey

You received this letter to let you know that a Customer Satisfaction survey is taking place shortly, and that you may be contacted and asked to take part. We’ve asked a survey company, Behaviour & Attitudes, to find out about your experiences of using the Pension application process. Behaviour & Attitudes may be ringing you to ask a few questions.

You do not have to take part in this survey. If you do not want to be contacted about the survey, please contact us at CustomerSatisfactionSurvey@welfare.ie and we will remove you from the dataset.

The Department provided Behaviour & Attitudes with your name and phone number only for the purpose of this one survey. The company has also been provided with some description of what category you fall into, as follows:

The Department will provide Behaviour & Attitudes with your name and phone number only for the purpose of this one survey. The company will also be provided with some description of what category you fall into, as follows:

• Sex
• Whether you applied for State Pension (Contributory) or State Pension (Non-Contributory)
• Whether you applied within six months of reaching pension age.
• The result of your application.

If you applied for the State Pension (Contributory),

• Did your application include Mixed, EU or Bilateral contributions
• Did you apply for a qualified adult increase at the time of your application

If you applied for the State Pension (Non- Contributory),

• Was a Social Welfare Inspector assigned to your case
• Were you on another Social Welfare payment prior to your application

The survey company does not get any other information.

You were randomly selected to take part in the survey. The Department put together a dataset for Behaviour & Attitudes only with the details above. Behaviour & Attitudes are contacting a sample of people who applied for the State Pension (Contributory) or the State Pension (Non-Contributory) recently.

Behaviour & Attitudes will call you and ask you questions from the survey. They’ll only collect one response per person.

Once the survey is done, any details about respondents provided to Behaviour & Attitudes will be deleted from their records. All the results will be anonymised; they will not be linked to you. Behaviour & Attitudes will break down the results, for example, to get the satisfaction scores for males and females, or for those under 66 years old and 66 years old and over, etc. Your answers, or choosing not to take part, can’t affect any current or future claim you might have with the Department in any way.

We need to understand how the Department of Social Protection can ensure that our Pension services meets its commitments in delivering services to you. To do this, we would be grateful for you to answer the survey questions and let us know your experiences. The survey will only take a few minutes.

The Department can contact customers for research purposes once other requirements in the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and Irish Data Protection Acts are met. Behaviour & Attitudes are contracted agents of the Statistics Unit of the Department for this survey.

The Department and Behaviour & Attitudes have a Data Processing agreement in place. This means that by law Behaviour & Attitudes can only use your data for the purposes of this survey. It also means they have to keep your data safe and secure at all times. Your answers are totally private and confidential – they can’t affect any current or future claim you might have with the Department in any way. You do not have to take part in this survey. If you do not want to be contacted about the survey, please contact us at CustomerSatisfactionSurvey@welfare.ie and we will remove you from the dataset.

For more information, please contact CustomerSatisfactionSurvey@welfare.ie or see gov.ie/dsp/surveys or Case Study 10, 2003.