From Efficient to Enduring: The Keys to an Extraordinary Client Experience

This gap between client perceptions and the views of CX leaders highlights a difference in perspective. While most firms are delivering good or great service, they are primarily focused on efficiency — streamlining processes to minimize friction. However, forward-thinking leaders know that the future isn’t about an efficient experience, but one that is both engaging and enduring.

New Client Experience Framework

The research points to a new framework that can serve as a guide for firms looking to not only improve where they are today but also plan for the future.

Step 1: Build an efficient experience.

The initial focus for most firms is on creating an efficient experience. By optimizing processes and reducing friction, they can make it easy to do business with the organization.

This focus reflects what CX leaders identify as their key pain points.

Step 2: Evolve to an engaging experience.

Once efficiency is established, the focus should be on creating an engaging experience that responds to clients’ needs, concerns and challenges with a more personalized approach. It celebrates the differences within couples and families, helping to foster deeper connections with clients.

An efficient experience, for example, includes a process to schedule the correct number of meetings with a client each year, while an engaging experience captures input to co-create an agenda that focuses on what is most important.

Step 3: Design an enduring experience.

An enduring experience delivers consistently and passionately and responds to the needs of the next generation. The tension between reacting to pain points and designing for the future is part of what makes great firms great, pushing them to innovate and evolve.

The path forward is defined less by today’s pain points and more by the CX leaders’ views of the future.

Key Actions to Create an Enduring Experience

Based on the research, five actions are key to building an enduring client experience:

1. Capture the right data at the right time.

Two-thirds of CX leaders agree that understanding client needs is crucial for an engaging experience. However, many firms are not capturing the personal sentiment data necessary to deliver personalization at scale.

While satisfaction and net promoter score are helpful, a great experience is about getting inside the hearts and minds of clients and using needs, concerns and challenges to design a personalized experience at scale. For example, how do clients rate their sense of confidence, clarity and control? What keeps them up at night?

2. Intentionally design the experience.

Tools like client journey mapping are key to designing a meaningful experience. However, two key factors stood out as critical to CX leaders:

• An experience that is adopted consistently: CX leaders are focused on delivering a consistent experience, while leaving room for individual advisors to put their stamp on the process. This issue has become increasingly important as a result of significant M&A activity. Across the board, leaders believe that a relatively high percentage of their advisors are not adopting or delivering a consistent experience.
  

• An experience that is responsive to client needs: About 80% of CX leaders say they tailor the experience based on key characteristics of the client. Wealth is the key driver of that segmentation, and a minority of CX leaders say they are delivering an experience tailored to a defined niche or delivering a different Year 1 experience. They agree, however, that designing an experience that is attractive to the next generation is key.
  

3. Create true accountability.

While 70% of firms assign responsibility for client experience to someone at a senior level, very few make it a dedicated role. Research focused on successful firms shows that this number provides a clue to that success.

As firms grow and evolve, the need for a dedicated leader, focusing on driving the experience across the firm, will be key.

4. Drive and measure team engagement.

CX leaders recognize that culture, and team engagement, play a role in delivering a meaningful client experience. Fully three quarters of CX leaders capture input from their team, but only 39% do so on a regular basis.

Related to team engagement is the delivery of training and development opportunities. Nearly two-thirds of CX leaders identified client experience training as a key consideration going forward. Today, fewer than a third provide this training to all team members.

5. Measure ROI.

Client experience has always presented challenges for firms that want to demonstrate a clear return on investment. Only 16% of CX leaders have a separate budget for client experience. Those who track that estimate that they invest less than 5% of total revenue in client experience.

Among those CX leaders who do measure impact, the focus is typically on referrals and/or attrition or organic growth. These metrics are clearly important, as a way to measure the effects of client experience efforts.

Additionally, we believe that advisory firms will not only need to measure these high-level metrics (for the firm and by advisor) but will need to focus on leading, rather than lagging, indicators of success. Those include engagement and personal sentiments such as confidence and concerns.

Your Next Step

Every advisory firm has a client experience, whether that is formally defined or not. Where you are today will drive where you should start — at efficient, engaging or enduring. And efficiency is only the starting point.

Julie Littlechild is the founder and CEO of Absolute Engagement, which helps advisory firms accelerate growth using real-time data that reflects the true needs of prospects and clients.