3 Top Ways to 'Touch' Clients in a Pandemic

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Over 500 marketing, distribution, and compliance leaders from the world’s largest financial services and insurance institutions gathered —  for the first time virtually —  at our annual Hearsay Summit last month to reimagine the advisor-client journey.

Together, we explored the ways our clients are delivering a human experience to their customers in these extraordinary times.

When we started planning this year’s Summit, we never thought the world would be going through a collective reimagining quite so extensive as it is right now.

Our planned theme, “Reimagining the Advisor-Client Journey,” aimed to explore delivering the last mile of the human client experience at digital scale.

But once the COVID-19 crisis hit, it accentuated the profound need for a human touch to reach across digital channels. So, within a month, we turned our live event virtual.

What stood out were the creative and inspiring ways our clients have responded to our environment and led the financial services industry forward.

The interaction and engagement throughout the two-day event illustrated the power of driving human connection through digital channels. We learned that no matter the channel, it’s the human connection that matters.

Here are the three key lessons for advisors on delivering the human touch.

1. Address the accelerated need for a human-via-digital touch

COVID-19 has highlighted things we already knew, and it also exposes the gaps in our systems.

While the financial services industry has been working on digital transformation for some time, it’s no secret that steering the ocean tankers of large enterprises through transformation is a lengthy, sometimes painful process — particularly when it comes to the tools and processes of often distributed workforces of advisors.

Kathryn Lattuca, leader of Emerging Experiences & Analytics at the Royal Bank of Canada, shared some insight on this topic during the opening keynote at Hearsay Summit.  Given the current environment, she’s focused on enabling advisors to more proactively and quickly step into digitization.

“Now that we’re sort of ‘coming together, apart’, these channels [that RBC provides its advisors] are becoming increasingly important and access to advisors through social media sites and texting is bridging all kinds of really complex gaps that we have around mobilizing our core business,” Lattuca said.

While the crisis is temporary, the changes to behavior and digital acceleration we’re experiencing as a result — more remote work, an expansion of digital communications, upgrades in digital processes and tools  – are not.