What Financial Professionals Can Learn about Creating a Better Client Experience with Empathy

by H. Adam Holt, CFP®️, ChFC®️
CEO and Founder, Asset-Map

I have to admit to you that the word empathy used in corporate nomenclature is causing a lot of eye-rolls these days.  

The amount of times I've heard how both technology and professionals need empathy in more recent conversations has certainly spiked. Although I know we’ve been using consumer empathy in design thinking for years with Asset-Map, I think it's really important to understand why empathy is climbing the charts as the buzzword of the year.  

The intentionality around an empathetic customer experience is what we’re all really talking about.

Understanding the customer - their pains, preferences, and desires - has always been a critical part of delivering an exceptional value proposition to clients.

For financial advice, it’s never been more relevant because the competition is forcing advisors to actually think about their client experience to try and rival online solutions and mobile apps that are clearly more convenient, accessible, and nearly free.

As a recovering financial planner, I know that how we treated people, and how thoughtful we were to people's experiences and needs, their concerns about the market and meeting their goals, their fears about making sure they had enough, or that their stuff was in order in some meaningful way, was always among the things that we kept top of mind.

It reminds me of how we need to be intentional about all of the things that we can influence. Reflecting on this idea, I recalled a recent experience I had pre-COVID in an Uber. The driver jammed on the gas, slammed on the brakes, and had an air freshener permeating a smell throughout the car that I can only describe as toxic.

Clearly, empathy training and awareness is actually pretty rare and it’s why we should celebrate it when we experience a pleasant customer experience.

We see a great amount of financial planning and client-facing technology that tends to prioritize the user experience of the professional over the consumer. While we appreciate that for many fintech vendors their client IS the professional, we need to better understand empathy beyond the professional to the consumer.

Although the Uber driver I mentioned earlier likely arrived at our destination in the shortest amount of time to meet their need to be efficient and move on to the next customer, the fact is that I was ready to throw up in the back seat from bouncing back and forth. The professional was empathetic to their own experience, not towards the customer who will think twice before ordering another Uber ride.

So when the advisor is in the driver’s seat and the customer is in the back seat of our financial advice experience, what are the ways that we need to drive to better accommodate them?

I know personally, I tend to drive pretty aggressively when I’m by myself - getting from Point A to Point B as fast and reasonably safe as possible. But when other people are in the car, especially children, I drive much differently. I’m very conscious of my turns and how I accelerate and press on the brake. Have you ever had that experience?

Let’s use our lesson on consumer empathy to deliver financial advice at their speed and pace. Let’s communicate at our client’s level of financial literacy and not be afraid to simplify our technical prowess.

And for those in the fintech industry who create software for those advisors, let’s set those professionals up for success by helping their end-consumers win. This is the kind of empathy we need to practice today and well into the future.