Technology and Client Retention for Financial Advisors
Building a relationship starts with talking, and most advisors and clients need to be talking more.
Customer happiness separates a good business from a great business. In the wealth management space, however, achieving client loyalty and retaining a group of customers into the long-term has unique challenges.
People expect the best when they agree to let an outsider manage their hard-earned money. Financial performance must be satisfactory, information needs to be quick and accessible, communication must be easy, and above all else, the personal relationships between client and advisor have to feel genuine and real.
“You don’t need to be best buddies and play golf together to have an emotional connection with clients,” says John H. Fleming, Ph.D., chief scientist and marketplace consultant at Gallup. “But if financial advisors manage their business in the direction of making strong emotional connections, there tends to be a rosy halo around them and their company. It’s like an insulator.”
Maintaining strong relationships around an emotionally sensitive topic like money has long been a challenge for even the most personable financial advisors.
New technology solutions like Polly Portfolio, however, can help build loyalty between client and advisor, starting by making it simple for advisors to provide relevant, and hence valuable insights to their clients anywhere, anytime. As advisors find it easier (and less time consuming) to call on their clients with valuable insights, conversations will become more frequent. As conversations become more frequent, trust and loyalty deepens.
Technology Increases Client Loyalty and Retention
To help, we’ve outlined three ways that advisors should look to technology platforms like our Bespoke Custom Investing (BCI) tool help increase client loyalty and retention.
1. Accessibility: Building a relationship starts with talking, and most advisors and clients need to be talking more. An FA Magazine survey found that the number 1 reason clients fire advisors is a failure to communicate on a timely basis. However, when the topic of discussion is a sensitive topic like someone’s personal wealth, the onus is on the advisor to demonstrate value rather than for the client to feel like they’re being sold. Traditionally, the key to good conversations is preparation — but the need to prepare can create a barrier to more frequent conversations. Technology can compress the process of preparing for a conversation from hours to minutes.
2. Relevance: A conversation that focuses on the topics that matter to a client is the key to making a client feel like they’re being helped rather than sold. Technologies that assist the advisor in zeroing in on the topics that matter to their clients and surfacing relevant insights around those topics in real time are invaluable.
Automated systems can coordinate client information and portfolios against the advisor’s chosen strategies to develop action plans personalized for each client. Polly Portfolio, for example, even generates a high-level summary of portfolio suggestions in plain English, as well as specific and actionable recommendations, ready for discussion with clients.
3. Value: Once clients have been onboarded and the initial flurry of activity has subsided, it’s as important as ever to nurture the existing relationship with increased communication and transparency. Continue to demonstrate value to the client even though fewer trades are being executed by being able to review any concerns or opportunities with them. The key here is to efficiently generate personalized explanations.
Our BCI service, for example, provides financial advisors with a portfolio decomposition function that highlights top trades within a portfolio. It also uses Polly Portfolio’s trade explain service to help financial advisors explain a client’s portfolio to the client. This works to increase the level of service an advisor provides after a prospect becomes a paying customer. In turn, the client’s perception of value, confidence, and loyalty all increase, helping you the advisor retain clients into the long-term.
Polly Portfolio currently offers a suite of software services for integration into your enterprise solution under the Bespoke platform. Stay tuned for a standalone offering for individual financial advisors as well — learn more and sign up for updates here or shoot us a note at bespoke@pollyport.com.
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