Experiences with NEST and other auto-enrolment providers

Hi all

Does anyone have any positive or negative experiences with either NEST or other providers they are willing to share? We only have experiences with NEST and they seem to be making things as difficult as possible! We are interested to know if any other providers are more user-friendly.

We have so far set up two clients with NEST without any major problems (small problems we've just put down to the learning experience). We now have another client where we are experiencing great difficulties with NEST. Our organisation has an online account with NEST where we can register clients, but each client is allocated to a specific individual in our office, depending on who normally runs their payroll. This is ok when that said person is in, but when they only work part time or are off for other reasons NEST won't talk to anyone else from our office!! We think it should be like HMRC where anyone from our office can ring up about any of our clients. (Wow, something good I'm actually saying about HMRC!)

Our newest pensions client wants to bring her staging date forward, and it seems we have to jump through a load of hoops to do that - going between NEST and The Pensions Regulator. After waiting for the designated person from our office to be in today to ring them, we then had to give them every single piece of information they already hold about our client (from when we originally registered her) before they could do anything! We now have to wait for them to consider whether she can bring her staging date forward.

This is all new to us and our clients, most of whom don't want anything to do with pensions and just expect us to sort it all out for them, yet NEST don't seem to be making it easy for us at all. You'd think when this is something the government now expect everyone to do they should be making it as easy as possible to administer, and encourage those who want to to start early.