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Steve Wershing:            
Welcome to Becoming Referable, the podcast that shows you how to become the kind of advisor people can’t stop talking about. I’m Steve Wershing. 95% of advisors in a recent study reported that something needs to change about the experience they deliver clients. And only 58% have a clear plan on what they intend to change. Those are just a couple of findings. From new research released by my podcast, cohost, Julie Littlechild. Changing environments like we have now translate into changing client needs and attitudes. And your experience needs to conform to that if you’re going to stay relevant. The use of digital communications, for example, in the client experience you provide, advisors are using a lot more electronic communication, not only to talk with clients, but to market themselves, they’re using more social media. Julie and I discuss why we believe your firm needs to deliver a more personalized experience to remain relevant and more importantly, stand out from other advisors.

We discuss strategies for how to change the client experience. We talk about the effect this all has on the scope of your offer. And then we tie it back to how to get client feedback, to help you tailor the experience. Finally, of course, we discuss how all this translates into adjustments you can make to your referral marketing program. It’s a particularly timely episode. I hope you enjoy it. So here now is my conversation with Julie about evolving the client experience through client feedback.

So, Julie, today we’re going to be talking about the evolution of the client experience and how, what kind of an impact that has on referrals. So why don’t we start with a big question and that’s, how do you think the client experience will need to evolve going forward?

Julie Littlechild:
It is a big question to start with.

Steve Wershing:            
It’s a big question. Start with the big stuff. Right, exactly.

Julie Littlechild:
If I could answer that, it would take all day.

Steve Wershing:            
42, that’s the answer.

Julie Littlechild:
It’s 12. So I think, there’s a number of probably trends that we need to look at. And it’s really interesting to me that we’re thinking about this so much because it’s 2020 and we’ve gone through what we’ve gone through. And yet, as we all know, we should always be thinking of this stuff as like, it’s almost as if it didn’t evolve before and now we’re being forced to look at this.

Steve Wershing:            
Right. Yeah, exactly.

Julie Littlechild:
But, I would say a few things as we look at it. First of all, that I think the client experience needs to be truly reflective of stated client needs and concerns and aspirations, and maybe in a way that it’s never been before. It’s evolved. And we’ve really got to understand how that evolution of expectations and needs and concerns should impact the experience. And maybe part and parcel of that is I think that we need to look very closely at personalization, right?

Gone are the days of the generic offer and generic communications that are okay for everyone. If we’re going to understand needs at the client level, then I think everything that we do needs to reflect what clients say is important. I think digital is an obvious one. We can’t get away from that. We’ve seen amazing strides in that, but it’s a big part of it. And yeah, in general, I think we should always be asking this question, but it’s good that we’re doing it now. How about you? What do you think has to change?

Steve Wershing:            
Yeah. I think you’re right, and I agree with you. And I think that a couple of things have gotten together to accelerate that. One is as you point out, digital communications. And so now it’s a lot easier and a lot more advisors are using platforms to get messages out. But I think that also runs the risk that a prospective client who’s evaluating different advisors could get the same exact message from two or three or four people. And I spent a lot of time talking about niche and creating that unique experience. And if what you send a client, they get from two or three other people, that whole idea is going to blow right up.

And I think that’s compounded by the idea of what we’ve gone through tis year. So we have more digital communications, we’ve got more advisors using more social media. And then with the pandemic, we have more clients who were engaging with their advisors more electronically and virtually. And so they’re probably more open to that kind of thing. So it’s more and more important, as you said, to really personalize the communication, personalize everything and make sure that you are communicating something unique that communicates with that specific client that you want. So in terms of this experience, I think you’ve just recently done some work on that kind of thing, right? You’ve done some looking into the client experience.

Julie Littlechild:
We started this assessment tool, in fact I’ll put a link to it in the show notes, where it was just designed to help advisors think through what needs to change. But we looked at the preliminary results of that. And I thought it was really, really quite interesting. So this is just advisors responding about their experience. And the first thing that jumped out at me is this there’s violent agreement across advisors that something needs to change. So 95%, you don’t usually see stats like that.

Steve Wershing:            
Wow, really?

Julie Littlechild:
95% of advisors said the client experience needs to evolve as a result of changing client needs and expectations. So I think we’re in agreement there. What interesting as we dug in, and we can talk a little bit about some of the data. It’s a smaller sample, but significant and I suppose.

Steve Wershing:            
Yeah, yeah.

Julie Littlechild:
Was the gap between what I know you and I believe is important, which is understanding what clients think about that change and the need for change. So for example, 95% needs to change. 58% said they had a clear plan in place for that change. And 56% said they understand how client needs have changed. And I might argue if it’s even 56, but you start to see that big gap right, where we might let assumption drive the day. And so, I guess the big learning was that things need to change. And then we tried to get a little more granular from there in terms of the specifics.

Steve Wershing:            
Right. Yeah, yeah. And that is amazing because I can’t even imagine 95% of a response to a survey saying anything.

Julie Littlechild:
Anybody.

Steve Wershing:            
But yeah, so we’ve got 95% who say it needs to change. And then we’ve got about half of the people saying that they believe they understand how it needs to change. And you and I, like you were referring to how much of them actually understand. And we get that that 56% thinks they know how it needs to change. But let’s dig into that a little bit. So do you have any ideas from that survey, from that research, about how they might change the experience?

Julie Littlechild:
So we structured it. So I suppose, survey design influences obviously the results. We honed in on certain areas that we thought would be impacted. And I think that advisors agreed that they were all impacted to a greater or lesser extent, but what we were looking at was the fundamentals of client experience. So how often do clients want to meet? How do they want to meet? Is it virtual? That sort of thing. We looked at the use of social media and whether that was changing. We talked about the types of client communications and we looked at how the needs of clients might change and the influence that might have on things like the client conversation and so forth. So those were some of the key areas. I think there’s some nuance in there, but we started with a pretty obvious one, which was frequency. Are you seeing anything on that when you think about the need for the frequency of contact to change?

Steve Wershing:            
Well, we see that it goes up and down depending on what’s happening in the environment. I think on one level, as this pandemic continues on, we see, and this is not in financial services, this is just generally, but we see people’s general level of anxiety going up and their level of stress going up. But for a lot of people, it’s not really even focused. It’s just this underlying feeling. I go biking on Wednesday mornings with a friend of mine and he was saying, “I go into Home Depot or I see something online. I find myself just really getting worked up about something,” which is really unusual for him because he’s a really calm guy, and friendly and optimistic.

But he was, he was saying that it’s just really ramped up. And I was talking with my cousin who is a dentist, and at one point I had had some pain in my jaw and he was saying, “Well, it sounds like you’re grinding your teeth at night. That’s what will give you that feeling.” And I said, “Oh, okay.” And he said, “And don’t feel unusual about that,” because he said, “You can’t believe the number of people that are coming in, they’re actually cracking their teeth because they’re grinding him so bad.” So with higher levels of anxiety, I think people need more reassurance and more frequent contact. And then of course, I think that there’s a reasonably good chance that over the next few months, we’re going to have some more market volatility.

And of course, whenever market volatility goes up, people need a lot more contact. So I think that that will always be fluctuating up and down, but I think the likelihood is that in the near term, there’s a really good chance that we’ll need to keep in touch with people more frequently. And of course, now that we’ve got clients oriented to communicating with us in different ways than they were before, multiple ways, that facilitates that and if it’s easier for them, then I would imagine that they might want it more. And so, did your research talk about how people communicate the different channels, the people can commute?

Julie Littlechild:
Yeah. We looked at channel and we looked at frequency. There wasn’t a high percentage of advisors who said that they had a really clear plan in place on frequency. A very few had asked clients about how often they want to meet or what they value as part of the meeting, which I thought was interesting. But I just wanted to highlight the point you just made about this nonspecific anxiety, because at some level, I think there’s an inclination to say, well, frequency of contact doesn’t need to change because my clients aren’t calling me and their portfolio is fine. Both of those two things are probably true, but we know what’s going on and we’re really talking about being that trusted professional, reaching out. And it doesn’t stop the day you hear you can go back to the, right?

Steve Wershing:            
Right.

Julie Littlechild:
I think we’re going to have something that is ongoing. I can say from the investor research though, that we do see really significant differences in the demand for frequency of contact across age groups. So by and large, younger clients are saying they want to meet more often.

Steve Wershing:            
Oh, interesting.

Julie Littlechild:
But to your second question there where you led and I took completely off course, is that they’re much more oriented toward a digital meeting. So it’s more frequent, more efficient. And so some of this I think is, well, pandemic or not, we’ve got to tackle this issue because younger clients are going to be looking for different things. So, yeah, definitely, we’re seeing a lot of change. A lot of advisors have said they’re doing digitally, I have no choice, but to do digital, but it’s almost like I’m waiting for the memo that says we can go back to in-person, and then we can go back there.

Steve Wershing:            
Yeah, right.

Julie Littlechild:
I tell you what the numbers that we’ve been seeing though from clients is really interesting. It’s not as if 100% of clients say digital is the way to go, but we’re literally seeing numbers that are well over 50% of them either saying online, or I don’t have a preference.

Steve Wershing:            
Oh, interesting.

Julie Littlechild:
So that to me is a big shift in terms of saying, all right, maybe we need to continue digital. And what do I need to learn about this process to be really effective at it? Because that’s a bigger.

Steve Wershing:            
Yeah. And if I can go back to a point that you just made and tie that back to something we were talking about before, you were talking about younger clients having a preference for digital.

Julie Littlechild:
Right.

Steve Wershing:            
So in the advisory boards that we’ve been doing, we’ve been asking people, because all the advisors have had to go digital, at least for now, so everybody’s looking forward to the time when they can get back together in person in the office. But for now everybody, or a lot of people really feel more comfortable with Zoom or something like that. And that population is accepting of it. And what we hear back, I could summarize as saying, we prefer in person and we’d like to do in person at least once a year, but otherwise, for the other times of year, or if you need to get a hold of as quickly or those kinds of, the digital is fine.

But if, for advisors who want to position themselves, especially to stay in touch with the next generation and bring the next generation onboard as clients, as the state plans are playing out, we need to pay attention to that, right? Because it’s that Wayne Gretzky thing of going where the puck is going to be. And so while our older clients may be more familiar and more comfortable and more accepting of the digital experience, I think we should pay close attention to your research that the next generation down prefers that means. So if we don’t have a good, organized, streamlined way of communicating digitally, then the likelihood is that we run the risk of not attracting that next generation down.

And I’ll tie that back to what we were talking about before, in terms of niche. One of the challenges with more digital communications and more stuff on the web and more content production, more digital media being distributed by advisors, this is a trend that’s been going on for a long time, but this is helping accelerated. So you’re no longer just in competition with other advisors in your neighborhood. You’re no longer in competition with the other advisors in town. Now you’re in competition with everybody. And just like we spoke with Meg Bartelt on recent episode, we get more people who are completely virtual practices. And so there is no geographic boundary. Now, your client, if they find exactly what they’re looking for, if they’re finding exactly the experience that they want, it doesn’t matter if they’re halfway across the country. That other advisor is in a position to potentially take that client that you wanted.

Julie Littlechild:
Absolutely. Look, we work with consultants and coaches and different things across the world now.

Steve Wershing:            
Right, yeah.

Julie Littlechild:
So I think you’re right, a huge competitive shift. It just, you reminded me, we were looking at the results of a, it was a firm survey we did, but it went to about 40,000 clients, like a large scale survey. And initially, looked at the data and it said 48% of clients said they preferred to go back to face-to-face. And then when you looked at it by age, even that was under 50%, but it was skewed heavily to the 70 plus.

Steve Wershing:            
Oh, interesting.

Julie Littlechild:
And that was a big part of the population.

Steve Wershing:            
Sure.

Julie Littlechild:
So yeah, definitely some differences. And I think that some of that plays into the other aspects of communication, like social media, right? Compliance issues aside, let me set that aside.

Steve Wershing:            
Sure. Yeah, right.

Julie Littlechild:
I know that there are some barriers, but I talk to a lot of advisors who say, “No, I absolutely don’t go there.” And I’ve wondered, and this is all I can say is it was a question, is that, throughout 2020, I found myself relying more on social connection because we didn’t have much choice. And I wondered at the same time, does that mean other people are using certain things more often and will that have an impact? So again, we don’t see overwhelming numbers of clients saying, I absolutely want to use social media with my advisor, but we’re seeing 20, sometimes 30% saying, yeah, I’d like to connect with my advisor that way. And that’s a shift, right? That’s a big change.

Steve Wershing:            
Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And these changes don’t announce themselves and they don’t show up and say, “Okay, now we’re going to transition to this.”

Julie Littlechild:
Yeah. Here’s a memo, go social today.

Steve Wershing:            
Today’s memo, demographic shift scheduled for next Friday.

Julie Littlechild:
That’s right. At 11, get ready.

Steve Wershing:            
Exactly. They happen and some changes are more gradual than others, but we can clearly see that shift and I think it’s accelerating and it’s something that we need to pay attention to because otherwise it’ll creep up on us. And if we’re not paying attention to us, we’re going to be stuck in the situation of what the heck happened.

Julie Littlechild:
You mentioned client communications, which is I think a huge, especially if we talk about referrals at the same time. So broadly, how do you think client communications need to shift or have shifted? And then maybe we could talk also about just the impact that has in terms of driving more referrals.

Steve Wershing:            
I think it’s in line with a lot of what we’re seeing in the different ways that advisors can promote themselves and communicate with the world is how they want to communicate with clients. And so what we see is a few things. One is there are more platforms for advisors to remind clients that they’re there and keep that top of mind status. We had Kevin Mulhern from AdvisorStream on the podcast a while ago. And so that’s a way that you can send individual emails or a weekly newsletter out to people with a bunch of articles. And so you’re not being promotional about it, you’re saying, “Hey, I found these couple of articles,” and you can pick them to correspond with things that the clients are interested or concerned about.

So one change in the communications is we have these mass customizable tools that makes it a lot easier to keep in touch with clients. And we’ve talked with clients who have received those and they really like them. They really think that their advisor is thinking about them when they send those things out. So that’s one thing.

The other thing that we see a lot more is video. Now that we have technology that makes it really easy to do that. We’ve done some boards with advisors who will post as frequently as a weekly video. And it may just be a couple of thoughts about what’s happened this week, or usually they’re not long, they’re just a couple of minutes. But clients respond to it really powerfully. They really like, because it’s engaging more of the senses. It’s not just one, it’s two or three. And they feel a connection there. And since now we’re connecting so much more frequently digitally with our friends because we’ve got to limit social contact, now you’re putting yourself in the same channel as they’re communicating with their friends, and it changes the relationship a little bit there.

Julie Littlechild:
Yeah, for sure. Speaking of stats that are extreme, one of the ones on this advisor poll that we did was that, so the statement was this, “I have a clear plan in place to provide communications that will support my clients based on their unique financial and non-financial challenges and concerns.” Okay, so bit of a mouthful.

Steve Wershing:            
Right.

Julie Littlechild:
But that was the statement. And a whopping 9% of advisors gave us a five out of five on that.

Steve Wershing:            
Wow.

Julie Littlechild:
Another 39% said it was a four out of five, so heading in that direction.

Steve Wershing:            
Sure.

Julie Littlechild:
But again, I thought it was interesting because in particular, because when we did our investor research, what we saw was such a clear shift, especially in March, April toward an interest in non-financial topics, right? The things that changed the most, it was health and it was stress and it was family. In my mind, I kept thinking of it as the things that are of interest are the same things that we’re talking about at the dinner table at night. Right? That’s what people are interested in.

Steve Wershing:            
Yeah, right. Exactly.

Julie Littlechild:
And maybe we should think a little more like that. So this need, I think for communications back to the initial statement about personalization, what’s on the mind of our clients, and then can we mass customize our mass personalize, I guess, in this case, based on what they’re saying really matters.

Steve Wershing:            
Right. Right. So I just wrote a blog post a little bit ago, about being an expert in your client, that you need to be an expert in your client and not the individual and not the people that you work with now, but your target client, the person that you’re building your business around. We talk about that as when you build a client-driven business, you create the business around that client persona, that particular person that you want to attract. And the more you can be the expert at that person and the expert is not their portfolio, the expert is their life situation, the expert is the stuff they worry about.

And I think that’s particularly important where we have this kind of an environment where we’ve got two interesting things going on. One is that the market’s doing fine and the other is everybody’s more anxious than normal. And so if they’re not anxious about the market, talking about the market’s not going to get you anywhere. But if you can address a lot of the other things that they’re concerned about and the challenges that they face, that will help connect you with them, that will help communicate to them that you understand who they are. And communicating that on a regular basis will position you much better to attract more clients and referrals.

Julie Littlechild:
And I would argue that we can also drive it down to the individual, in addition to all that work at the persona level for the whole business, being able to have a way to understand what your clients are thinking about right now. And that might be different from what they’re thinking about a month from now, that’s the reality, right?

Steve Wershing:            
Yeah.

Julie Littlechild:
And connect. You and I were talking before we started today about parenting. Now, if later I find an article that was really interesting to that, and I send it to you, it’s like, oh, you listened. You actually thought about that. There is an interesting connection to referrals here, though, as well on this whole topic of communications or content, I guess what we’re really looking at, because when we looked at our investor data and we cut it between clients who’d referred and who hadn’t, 69% of clients who referred said they’d shared content from their advisor. And it was about 29% for everyone else.

Steve Wershing:            
Oh, interesting.

Julie Littlechild:
So you start to really see that we’re talking about client experience and we’re talking about client engagement and that’s the primary focus here, but it turns out you can leverage exactly the same stuff to drive referrals as well.

Steve Wershing:            
Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And that’s a lot of these platforms where you can personalize communications, send them out. But when you are sending something that addresses a concern that your client shares with their friends, or when you give them a resource or connect them with an article or something like that, that connects with that, yeah, that is a great platform for referrals because it makes it really easy for your client to help out their friend who has the same problem that they do by passing along that content. And that again, just exposes you to those friends and establishes you as that expert, the person who’s in touch with those issues and understands that particular life situation. So are there other particular granular things that you saw in your research or that you’ve heard about that that help drive referrals through communication?

Julie Littlechild:
I don’t want to repeat that, but I think that the overall thing we’re seeing is just being very intentional about leveraging what you’re already doing. And that means looking at it through a completely different lens. For example, as part of our, when our clients do feedback, we also work with them on taking action, right, when they’re interested in that. And a big part of that is often I want to take action on the referral opportunity. So we’ve worked now to map out this entire process that it’s sometimes just about reducing friction.

So for example, you gather feedback from a client. They say they’ve referred. If that’s the case, they responded to a survey and they’ve referred, they get a segmented message that acknowledges the referral that invites them to an appreciation event and that they can easily forward to friends and family. Right? So you’re taking literally one communication and saying, “What would make this valuable, not only to my clients, but to their friends and family? And then, how do I reduce the friction so that it’s really easy for them to do that?” So that’s the lens I like to take is just what can we do to squeeze the juice out of this client communication so that it drives more referrals as well.

Steve Wershing:            
Yeah. Now beyond just the communications, you also talk about the focus of client review meetings.

Julie Littlechild:

Yeah.

Steve Wershing:            
And so what kinds of ways can we improve that? How do we upgrade that?

Julie Littlechild:
Well, I think we’ve talked about this maybe in the past before where advisors have been saying to us, gosh, I know this came up in one of our podcasts, I’m talking to my clients all the time, but what’s the next conversation, right?

Steve Wershing:            
Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Julie Littlechild:
What would actually make this more compelling? I do think we need to think quite seriously about how we communicate with our clients in those review meetings. We’ve done a lot of work around client self-confidence and it relates back to your initial comment about anxiety. And I think if we have a way to understand where clients are at, not by just saying, “Hey, how you doing?” And if they say fine, moving on. That’s like a husband and wife. I’m fine. Okay.

Steve Wershing:            
Which of course, when you ask your wife, it means not fine. Right.

Julie Littlechild:
Exactly. Code. But you know what I mean, just having the ability to peel back the onion a little, I think, it’s a new skill. Some advisers, so many advisors I talk to, are built for this kind of thing. Right?

Steve Wershing:            
Right.

Julie Littlechild:
It’s just their skill. But here was something, the one piece of this poll that shocked me completely was really one stat. And it was this, 51% of the advisors we talked to said they had asked their clients if the pandemic had impacted their thinking about the financial future. That is where I thought it would be 95%, because this has had an impact on how we feel and our values and our vision of the future and all of that. And in the idea that we weren’t always leaning into, has this changed your thinking about where we’re trying to go. And let’s face it there’s a lot of needs, insurance, estate, philanthropic giving. There’s some real significant changes in needs that I think is just, that’s just sitting on the table for us to take right now.

Steve Wershing:            
Right, right. Yeah. And so in our advisory boards, we’re incorporating a sequence of questions about that kind of thing exactly. And so we ask questions like, since the beginning of the pandemic, have your thoughts about your goals or your retirement, have they accelerated or stayed the same or delayed? And you get people talking about that because you’re right, we’ve talked about that on a couple episodes about client’s needs and wants, are always in flux. But in times of upheaval like this, they change even faster. And then those outside circumstances come in and change them. So yeah, that’s a critically important thing to talk about.

Julie Littlechild:
We’ve talked about so many different things here, the frequency of contact and the form and needs and all of these different things as parts of the client experience and may evolve. I guess the obvious question is what do you think advisors need to be either doing differently or maybe just where should they start with all of this, and maybe to challenge the potential that they’re allowing their own assumptions to drive their strategy?

Steve Wershing:            
Yeah. So I think that the thing that advisors should do first is to, if they’re not already, get that client feedback, right? Go out to those clients, organize your advisory board, or if you used to have a board that met personally or met in person, do a digital one. Don’t put it off. Start collecting that feedback and when you collect it, really honestly reflect on what does this say about our business model and our service model and is what we’re hearing an indication that we should revisit what our total client experience looks like. And should we customize that at all? Should we update it? Should we change it? What are your thoughts? From your perspective, what do you think advisors should do today?

Julie Littlechild:
Look, we’re both built around input from clients in very different ways. So I can’t help but to focus there. We’ve got to get closer to what they’re really thinking and feeling. But the one thing I would say to add onto that is that this isn’t one and done, right? That we need, more than ever, always did, but recognize now a process to have ongoing input from our clients. I’m schizophrenic right now in some of my thinking. I swear, within an hour, I could change my mind. And it’s probably not a good term to say, because I didn’t mean it in that way, but you know what I mean? It’s like my emotions are up and down, and that’s changing and changing my needs.

So we need to stay on top of that if we’re going to ensure that the experience is consistently reflective of our clients. Advisers are doing a great job. They’ve got deep relationships. I think we need to be looking for a way to connect and support that in a more robust way.

Steve Wershing:            
Right, right.

Julie Littlechild:
I do think we have to start with those questions. I will put that assessment link in the show notes though, as I said, because sometimes just a little self-reflection can be an easy start as well.

Steve Wershing:            
I think that’ll be great. Well, that all sounds great. And I think there are a lot of good ideas in here for advisors. So Julie, as always, it’s wonderful to see you and to join you. And we hope that this has been useful for everybody, and we look forward to seeing you next time.

Julie Littlechild:
Take care.

Hi, it’s Julie again. It was great to have you with us on Becoming Referable. If you like what you’ve been hearing, please do us a favor and rate us on iTunes. It really does help. You can get all the links, show notes and other tidbits from these episodes at becomingreferable.com. You can also get our free report, Three Referral Myths and How They Limit Your Growth, and connect with our blogs and other resources. Thanks so much for joining us.