How to Challenge Your Advisory Firm in 2020
By H. Adam Holt, CFPⓇ, ChFCⓇ
When you’re trying to grow your advisory firm, it’s helpful to understand what other financial professionals are doing to invest in their practice.
But unless you’re involved with a community of like-minded advisors, it can be hard to find relevant information to guide your efforts.
Over the past two years, our team at Asset-Map has conducted an Advice Journey survey with hundreds of wealth managers, insurance agents, RIAs, fee-based financial planners, consumers, and more.
The survey provided us with insights into commonalities between what financial professionals and consumers expect from the customer journey.
Here’s what we learned, and how you can leverage the results we uncovered to enhance your advisory firm’s growth.
Stages of the Customer Journey
Understanding the stages of the customer journey is the first step to building a better advisory firm in 2020.
There are five areas you need to focus on:
Introduction
The process and experience created by how you meet clients and prospects.
Interaction
How you connect with people. Are your interactions done by phone, digital, mobile, face to face, or a mixture of them all?
Guidance
How you develop solutions and then deliver those recommendations to your clients.
Implementation
The processes you use to document advice and track the stages of your client experience.
Ongoing Relationship
The service you deliver that helps you cultivate long-lasting and trusted relationships with your clients.
Our survey revealed that there are certain concerns within each stage where the expectations for both consumers and advisors overlap.
What matters to both groups of people indicate the highest value investments you can make in your firm.
What Matters Most to Consumers and Advisors
Within the five general areas of the customer journey, there are 10 areas of overlap that demand your focus.
But before you read through the rest of this section, click here to download our Customer Journey worksheet.
By following along, you can identify the three most important areas of the customer experience your firm needs to improve in 2020.
As you read each section, give yourself a score of 1-10 on how well you’re doing, with 10 being the highest.
At the end, find your three lowest scores. Those are the three most important areas of focus for your firm’s growth.
Welcome to the Web 3.0, where even blogs are interactive.
Ready? Let’s get started.
Introduction
Impressions
Your website is your firm’s first impression—what does it say about you? People want to get connected with you fast, and your website is the place where they can discover what you do and how you’ll support them.
But impressions don’t live on your website alone. Consumers are increasingly visiting Google and social media to validate your firm.
Scheduling
How does your scheduling process work? Consumers have compared the scheduling process they want from their advisor to be like that of a dentist. Make it fast, efficient, and repeatable.
Your firm can leverage tools like Calendly, ScheduleOnce, and TimeTrade to manage the process so it’s not a pain for consumers or a time-waster for your advisors. All of these apps, and others, allow your client to find available times on your calendar in real-time and schedule an appointment without the back-and-forth so common with setting up meetings.
Interaction
Meeting Environment
Consumers will remember what they felt after a meeting with their advisor. Did they feel understood? Confused? Creating a referrable experience in your meetings is about the details. Consumers will make unconscious or subconscious judgments on how put together you and your environment are, including the cleanliness. Presentation cannot be understated.
Data Collection
Advisors all have a different data collection method. Some prefer to collect information digitally before a meeting, and others prefer the “shoebox” approach where clients bring paper documents to the first meeting.
Most clients, however, feel like demanding such a large amount of detail at the beginning of a relationship can be intimidating. But those feelings have to be balanced against what your compliance officer demands from a Know Your Client (KYC) perspective.
What you ask your clients upfront goes a long way in determining how they feel about working with you. How do you balance your regulatory requirements with creating a smooth entry to working with you?
Guidance
Analysis
The technology you select plays a critical role in how you analyze a client’s situation and create their plan. The three-most critical technologies for most advisors include CRM, financial planning, and portfolio accounting.
Your analytical tools need to talk to each other so you can make decisions faster, and communicate your guidance to clients with less effort. But most solutions tend to prioritize the advisor experience, and not the client experience. How you connect your technology to your client requires intentional planning and preparation, because ultimately, your tech does need to support your customer experience.
Recommendations
Both consumers and advisors alike ranked Recommendations as a key milestone in the journey. Recommendations can be delivered through IPS statements, annuity and product fee comparisons, illustrative comparisons, and much more. How are you delivering recommendations that make complex financial products simple to your clients?
Implementation
Implementation
Consumers want an on-demand style of execution and robo-advisor style trading/rebalancing. A common refrain was that they want to track their implementation like FedEx tracks a package, and they want to move money easily between investment accounts like Vemo lets them pay their friends. How well does your technology support experiences like those when adding clients to your firm?
Transparency and Documentation
When someone’s on a journey, they want to know where they are. It’s why your kids ask you if you’re there yet 100 times during a long car ride. In the same way, you should include reporting and feedback for clients during implementation to give them a sense of where they are in the process.
Beyond clients, though, you need to document stages for your team. Staff, other advisors, and even compliance officers need to easily see what’s been done and what’s next for a client. How well do you leverage your technology to keep track of your files and notes?
Relationship
Service Delivery
The means by which you deliver your service make a difference to consumers. At the lowest level, you should offer performance reporting, file archives, audit trails, and communication capabilities through a relationship portal or mobile app.
Digital tools can create a window into your relationships and give clients a mental location to associate with their money. Years ago, that used to be a branch of a local bank. Today, it’s your mobile app.
Ongoing Engagement
Your communication should only increase once a person has moved from being a prospect to a client. Social media, ongoing relevant content, and offering organization and collaborative tools are all ways you can offer value beyond investments to clients.
Look to leverage dedicated client communication tools like Snappy Kraken, Everplans, Biz|Equity, Hearsay, and AdvisorStream to amplify the ways in which you can create strong ongoing contact with clients.
Your Three Key Areas for Firm Growth
Now that you’ve thought about what your firm is doing in each of these areas, take a look at your worksheet and circle your firm’s top three areas for growth. These should be the areas you gave the lowest scores.
Now, it’s time to identify how you can improve these parts of the customer journey. Talk to your team to get multiple perspectives and rank your three areas by priority.
Once your plan is started, you need to identify how to test your improvement. It’s easy to go down the wrong path and not actually be right in your assumptions. Getting validation that something is working is the most important step toward measurable growth.
Didn’t download your worksheet earlier? Click here to get your copy.
If you’re ready to see how Asset-Map’s illustrated planning capabilities can help you improve client communication throughout the customer journey, click here to schedule a demo.