Novelette Tucker

Charles Stringer, chief financial officer (CFO) of architecture and engineering firm Cooke Douglass Farr Lemons in Jackson, Mississippi, characterizes Novelette Tucker as the type of recordkeeping service representative who is “out of the ordinary. I can just pick up the phone and call her with a question, and she bends over backwards to help.”

For instance, Stringer recalls a time when he was trying to upload participant contributions into the retirement plan system after having made a change to one of the contributions, and the inputs were not going through. It was late in the day, but Tucker, a client relationship manager with his firm’s recordkeeper, Ascensus, guided him through the process, even staying after hours to accomplish the task. “Novelette stayed quite late, cheerfully at that,” Stringer says.

On another occasion, Tucker observed that many employees who were under 35 were not participating in the plan. After asking Stringer for his permission, she designed a piece of communication to educate younger workers about the value of consistent investing and compound growth through participation in the markets and how valuable those savings would be by the time they turned 65.

That communication was so effective that, for a period of time, the firm had 100% participation in the plan, Stringer notes. “You don’t get that kind of voluntary participation in plans too often,” he says.

Tucker “has also been helpful in getting information to us when we have issues,” Stringer continues. “She directs us to the right information and goes above and beyond with the kind of help she provides to us. She has helped us file Form 5500. She has been invaluable to me to help me do my job—so much so that she is almost like an assistant. She makes my job massively easier and is very personable and attentive in doing so.”

Tucker says, “I always tell my clients when I do my welcome call that my job is to make their job easier and that they should feel comfortable coming to me with any questions they have. I try to put myself in their shoes.”

—Lee Barney