Reveal and respond: What truly matters to prospects and clients

It’s no secret that advisors want to deliver a great client experience. In the past, that's meant delivering outstanding service. But our industry — like so many others — is evolving out of the service economy and into the experience economy. That means that clients don’t just want excellent service, they expect a holistic experience that guides them from one stage of their financial lives to another — informed by their values, goals and feelings. To show they’re attuned to the needs of the modern client, advisors need to push beyond meeting service expectations to deliver a truly engaging experience.

Increasingly, advisors are acknowledging that inviting input from clients is critical to informing and elevating the overall experience. However, capturing meaningful client input is about more than gathering feedback. While surveys can certainly help advisors better understand clients’ needs and expectations, they aren’t effective in driving meaningful engagement. Instead, advisors need a process that allows them to go deeper into the needs, feelings and concerns of their clients and to use this information as “data” to guide the experience.

The future of client experience demands an entirely new approach. This involves revealing and responding to the true needs of prospects and clients—one that not only unearths their perceptions, preferences and expectations, but also their concerns and challenges. That future is possible now as we combine a deep understanding of the drivers of engagement with new technology that makes it easy for clients to share their needs and for advisors to capture that information in real time.

SHIFTING FOCUS FROM CLIENT EXPECTATIONS TO CLIENT NEEDS

To date, as an industry, we’ve leaned heavily on tools like Net Promoter Score surveys to better understand what is expected of advisors. While NPS surveys measure the overall experience, they do little to help advisors get inside the hearts and minds of individual clients.

Today advisors are able to use new methods to have authentic conversations on a one-to-one basis, digging far below the surface. Feelings have a huge impact on financial planning and serve as important data points that can drive personalization of the planning experience for each client.

HOW CAN ADVISORS CAPTURE THAT DATA AND RESPOND IN REAL TIME?

Previously, advisors could use traditional surveys to capture high-level feedback at a given point in time. But it was difficult to uncover the real time, one-to-one input that would drive authentic engagement.

The challenge is this: We as human beings are all wonderfully unique. We have individual aspirations, needs, desires and concerns. Furthermore, we’re not static. We live in a constant state of evolution, in partnership with other people, all against the backdrop of continually shifting circumstances — like fluctuations in the market, rising interest rates, or even a global pandemic.

As a result, we can’t rely on traditional forms of feedback to capture what’s really happening in the hearts and minds of prospects and clients. Why? Because life is often messy and complex — this depth of nuance and insight can’t simply be harvested annually, quarterly or at other scheduled intervals. However, there are tools that empower advisors to elicit this vital input, automating certain tasks and streamlining client communications. These tools make it feasible for advisors to dig deeper, build trust and challenge their clients at scale, using strategies that guide every person they work with to engage further in the work of designing their financial future.

‘REVEAL AND RESPOND’ — THE TOOL ADVISORS NEED

If advisors want to drive more meaningful and engaged client relationships, they need to be equipped with tools to reveal and respond to the true needs of prospects and clients in real time. It’s a time-consuming process, but technology is stepping in to allow them to quickly address the essential issues for their clients and uncover the corresponding planning implications more efficiently.

We found a way to naturally incorporate client prompts and polls into tools that advisors are already using to communicate with clients. These questions are meant to take the client’s temperature and gauge confidence or concerns at exactly the right time — as the client or prospect is coming in for a meeting.

The idea here is to create a safe environment for the client to reveal to the advisor how they’re feeling, therefore pushing those insights into the agenda for a co-created meeting that’s focused on what is most important. Clients aren’t always good at articulating how they are feeling, so it’s essential for advisors to have a framework to assist them in teasing the client’s feelings out.

In some cases, capturing input from each person in a couple separately supports the advisor in gleaning the most honest input from both parties, which can then be filtered into the agenda. Then, as needed, the advisor can mediate the situation, highlight points of alignment and help the couple work together toward their financial goals from the most informed, engaged place possible.

To keep pace with client expectations for a truly bespoke, intimate financial planning experience, advisors need the tools to ask the right questions, at the right time, to trigger the appropriate next action for clients. The voice of the client needs a champion, and there’s no one better suited for that responsibility than a trusted advisor who is looking for opportunities around every corner to elevate the client’s feelings, needs and wants.

Julie Littlechild is founder and CEO of Absolute Engagement.