Stop being so digital

In order to build a deeper bond with your clients, try being less digital.

Many advisers have spent the past decade improving communications with clients via digital platforms. We provide email newsletters, quarterly video updates on the markets and tweets on the latest news.

Now, of course, the large discount firms use bots and automated voice systems to deliver virtually all their services.

While the power of technology can be awesome, and it helps us reach a larger audience, here’s one piece of advice you don’t get often: Stop. Being. So. Digital.

If you’re a financial adviser, that is, a human being providing financial advice and guidance to other human beings, take steps to ensure that you are offering human interactions rather than merely digital ones.

The clients who have hired you have done so because they want a personal relationship. If they wanted a purely digital experience, they could certainly find a variety of offerings online for much less than they pay you.

I’ve been an adviser for almost 30 years. While I find myself learning something new almost every day, here are a handful of things we employ in our offices to make sure that our clients feel as if they are working with an organization comprised of actual human beings.

A person always answers the phone. We could certainly cut our costs by using technology to answer our phones, but we have always believed it’s a critical component of providing service to have a caring person answer the telephone. 

Personalized note cards. How often do you receive a handwritten note these days? How do you feel when you get one? We encourage everyone in our organization to send out note cards each week.

Small, dedicated client service teams. As your organization grows, it’s easy for clients to lose their connection to your firm if they interact with a new person each time they call. To counteract this, we organize our CSRs and adviser support staffs into small, dedicated teams that serve a specific group of clients.

“Because we care gifts.” We love sending our clients small gifts, so much so that we have all our associates track how many gifts they send each quarter. The goal is to illustrate to the client that, first, we are listening to them, and, second, that we care about them. As an example, a client might mention they are going on a cruise to the Panama Canal. We’ll arrange to have a book about the Panama Canal sent to the client’s home.

Yes, our firm was an early adapter of digital marketing and communication. But we have a client care team whose sole purpose is to monitor and improve the experience clients have when interacting with our company.

Remember, it costs a lot less to personally communicate with an existing client than it does to find a new one. Not being exclusively digital helps your firm look better, and it helps your clients feel better in the end.

[More: Repapering is anything but easy]

Scott Hanson is co-founder of Allworth Financial, formerly Hanson McClain Advisors, a fee-based RIA with $8 billion in AUM.