4 REGIONS, 4 VIEWS, ON THE WORLD POST COVID-19: UK
“Music concerts with Micrashells – is this the way forward for financial advisors?”
Maintaining the Adviser and Customer personal relationship.
Face to face is obviously always going to be the best option; sadly, with social distancing, we have to come up with the next best thing. Could this be it?
Is there life on Mars?
A new way of meeting face to face – How about the Micrashell Hazmat Suit as reported by Billboard, designed for millennials who want to go clubbing! This is a serious attempt to design a practical PPE face mask so you can go to see your favorite band or DJ and socialize in a mass gathering without the 2-meter distance rule.
Would advisors meet their customers the same way?
Maybe for younger people this is a fantastic innovation, but I think it might be off putting, as you are talking about your pension investments, to have someone dressed like Darth Vader sat across from you. And there is an infection control risk sharing an iPad, to read documents and getting the signatures.
As the workplace has adopted video calls and chat, it’s time to think about the journey from the customer’s point of view.
Face to Face:
A Video meeting can be a good two-way exchange, where clients’ investment dashboards could be shared on a screen, ideas presented, still tailored and personalized to the customers ‘needs via a smart portal. For compliance, these can be recorded as well, which could come in useful in terms of enforcing good practice.
Execution:
When it comes to the process, the customer does not want to know all complexity behind financial planning and risk management.
The siloed teams working with the advisor to go from accessing funds information, easily viewing portfolio details, modelling changes, getting proposals packs approved and generated, and actually switching funds.
How some firms are doing this today?
Digitising the end-to-end processes is not a new concept to VERMEG, for example, we have helped two leading UK retirement service providers realise their goal to digitize their processes and deliver an award-winning customer engagement user experience. Standing back and rethinking the opportunity from the customer’s point of view, we designed a 7 step journey, which takes our Palmyra low code application platform, with our library of ready to use components, to create an out of the box intermediary to customer workflow process.
Thinking Green.
Removing travel from the equation also means that advisors can reduce environmental damage from travelling and become more efficient as they are cutting out the travel time between appointments.
Linked to a good CRM, you can switch from overlong meetings which are spaced too far apart to more frequent, shorter, and more productive meetings with a full audit trail and management overview.
Overall, as we have seen (according to tech leaders) 2 years’ worth of digital transformation in just 2 months, it’s time to think from the customers’ viewpoint and deliver the best digital service you can, as soon as you can for the new “normal” world we are now living in. Life goes on so let’s adjust to it!
DALE EASTHAM
SENIOR DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION CONSULTANT