The COVID-19 pandemic has forever changed some of what many investors expect from the overall client experience (CX) that their advisors provide, according to Julie Littlechild, CEO and founder of Absolute Engagement, a global research and training firm focused on increasing client retention and referrals within the financial services industry.
For example, if a client still wants to meet virtually like they did during the height of the pandemic instead of in person, the advisor should be prepared to do that, she said during a recent interview with ThinkAdvisor.
Advisors should also be sure to personalize the client experience more so than they did in the past and engage clients and their spouses at a "deeper level" than before, she said.
Here are some of the insights she provided during the interview.
THINKADVISOR: What changes in CX and/or client advisor communications in 2022 were most important for advisors?
JULIE LITTLECHILD: It was kind of an interesting period. Just for context, we go out and do this investor research every year [based on] about a thousand investors across the country. So that's where we draw a lot of our insights from.
What we were really looking at in 2022 was, were we coming back from some of the changes that hit from COVID, or were some of those more permanent?
So I saw them in these two buckets: The most common thing that people seemed to be focusing on was the service element. So are we meeting virtually? Those kinds of core service elements for CX.
And we certainly saw that we're not going back. Clients continue to want to have a hybrid or a virtual option to meet with their advisor. But I think that was expected to some extent.
Obviously it changed how advisors have been dealing with clients, but I don't think it's any great surprise. But what we were really trying to focus on was how is [their] mindset changing? So when we really look at clients, how are they feeling? How are they feeling about their financial future? Are they still feeling anxieties? Are there concerns that are really lurking? And then how could that impact the client experience?
And then what I thought was most important is that advisors needed to kind of lean into how their clients were feeling and then provide communications or hold conversations that reflected those things. Not generic content. Not their standard review agenda. But really digging in to see how clients were feeling, not assuming everything had gone back.
So I think that's changed a lot about how they operate or should.
I think that that was the underlying impetus for change, but if you think about the trends that we might talk about more often, personalization was certainly a big part of that.
That seems to be the biggest challenge right now, and I think the interesting thing is that technology is now sort of emerging, if you look at the whole advice tech segment of technology, to support advisors in doing exactly that.
So to me the underlying cause of this trend was how people are feeling, but really it's caused us to say, 'How do we personalize the client experience more so than we have in the past?'
What are a few of the things that advisors should be doing for 2023 and why?
I think they need to incorporate the client in designing the client experience. We can no longer say, "I'm going to build an experience based on what I think is important as an advisor."
