How to attract, and keep, young high-net-worth clients

The high-net-worth market has grown significantly over the past six years, with nearly one million new high-net-worth individuals (HNWIs) added globally in 2014, according to the 2015 World Wealth Report.

Every year there is a higher proportion of younger affluent investors who prefer to use mobile phones, smartwatches, tablets and other mobile devices for nearly all their information, transactions, and interactions. Like all wealth management clients, they expect strong portfolio performance and exceptional client service; they just want them to be digital and ubiquitous. In fact, 65% of all HNWIs expect to run most or all of their wealth relationships digitally within the next five years.

Younger HNWIs want — and expect — a seamless experience across all devices and platforms. They don’t think about which device or platform they are using for their transactions. They expect touch points across all channels to be aware of their previous interactions with your brand, and they expect their experiences to be not only seamless, but also optimized for each platform and device they use.

And they are constantly judging the effectiveness of each interaction with your brand across channels and comparing it against their experiences not only with your competitors, but with all brands across all touch points, including Amazon, Facebook, Google and Apple.

This sought-after segment has a broader choice of wealth management services and providers than ever before, including new, nimbler entrants and established providers with new technologies that are challenging the traditional financial adviser value proposition and business model. Wealth managers who don’t deliver a seamless, high-value, cross-device and cross-channel customer experiences and build a culture of customer-focused innovation risk losing clients to competitors who do.

(Related read: Planning for millennial market disruption)

Incremental customer experience improvements won’t satisfy them. In order to stay competitive and continue to be successful, wealth managers need to reinvent the way they deliver their services and align them with the changing needs of HNWIs. Here are five ways to set up an effective framework for getting there:

1. Design a consistent, relevant, convenient, valuable and differentiated customer experience. To survive and thrive in the digital economy, wealth managers need a clear, bold vision for creating a seamless, tailored, and engaging user experience that will satisfy their clients better than anyone else does. That experience must extend business functions seamlessly across mobile, social, online and offline channels, on any device or platform, and give clients efficient and timely access whenever, wherever and however they prefer. A banking customer may begin an interaction online but then switch to the contact center before finally visiting the branch.

There has to be a common connected platform to support this journey that prevents users from having to explain the context all over again. It must be both scalable and flexible, able to support ongoing innovation as client and business needs change.

2. Use engagement and analytics to drive design and innovation. Your user experience design starts with a deep understanding of your customers. What tasks are they trying to complete? What are their motivations for interacting with you? What outcomes are they looking for? For example, if they are looking for a quick view of their investment positions or their account transactions, provide a fast access page that needs fewer clicks to get to the data. Use ongoing engagement and usage data analysis to gain insights into how you can make clients’ interactions with you faster, simpler, easier and more valuable.

3. Determine the technology requirements for implementing a seamless customer experience. Engage a partner to do a business and technical analysis of your products, platforms, applications and services. Map them against your strategic goals and technology capabilities, and recommend a rollout of necessary upgrades to meet your business objectives. For example, a national bank client needed to provide customers with access to their financial information across all of their business and personal accounts. We simplified their provisioning and entitlement system so that the advisers could access and manage customer information without IT support, improving service and satisfaction.

4. Integrate your design and development processes. Have your design and development teams work collaboratively on a road map for creating and improving the customer experience across all channels. It should build user validation and intelligent testing processes into every project plan. It should use an agile approach in design and development that enables your teams to experiment, validate, fail, refine and improve prototypes rapidly and iteratively. Start with the mobile channel, which offers an intimate relationship with the customer that enables faster feedback and more opportunities to deploy, try, test, learn and improve.

5. Change the firm’s culture — and organization, if necessary — to put customer needs and wants at the center of every business decision. Ingrain a new culture of customer focus, continuous improvement and innovation throughout your organization. Everyone should routinely monitor what HNWIs are saying on social media about their goals, priorities and challenges, and about your firm and your competitors.

At the same time, look for ways to use technology for business-process improvements that benefit both your clients and your firm, such as enabling advisers to bring new clients onboard with multiple account types on mobile devices — tablets, laptops or smartphones — and streamlining on-boarding of new business units so your firm can immediately capitalize on growth opportunities.

James Williams is the director of experience engineering at Ness SES.