Why wealth advisors can’t avoid talking to customers

Customer engagement will not only allow wealth managers to nurture loyalty within their customers but can yield strong results by tailoring services to their needs, according to Kidbrooke.

In a new blog post, Kidbrooke explains that firms can greatly benefit from spending more time talking and listening to their customers. Having a consistent engagement with a customer increases the chance the customer will recommend the product to friends and family and continue to be a customer in the future.  

The post said, “Even more interesting is how engagement can enable listening to customers, learning more about their needs and behaviours and using that knowledge to improve your offering to them. The practice of “push” communications or talking “to” customers is used almost universally; the concept of “pull” communications or drawing customers into a conversation, is used less frequently but can yield powerful results.”

Push marketing is the process of advertising products to customers to entice them in, while pull marketing relies more on building loyalty and trust through showing them it is the right product they are looking for.  Successful firms will use different engagement methods at different stages of their customer’s life.

According to data from Dimension Data, 84% of firms using push marketing increased revenue; however, only 10% of respondents believed their firm’s experience is best in class.  

The key to using push notifications is preparing engagements for people in certain moments of their life, it said. For example, a woman in her 30’2 might have increased for savings allocation due to a promotion, pay rise or new job. A message to her indicating there are new products that fall within her risk appetite and investment objectives could be of interest to her.

The tough task is trying to be ready for these moments. Kidbrooke’s OutRank solution helps advisors evaluate and measure progress a customer is making with their investment objective and send a message to a customer to aid this.

There are a number of ways this can help drive value for the customer. If the client is a decade away from retirement, by putting their portfolio through OutRank it could reveal a relatively high allocation to fixed income. A quick message prompting discussion of reallocating and how this could improve growth would be welcomed.

Alternatively, if a customer is drawing down their pension, OutRank could see the risks and benefits of different rates of drawdown.

As for pull engagement, Kidbrooke said, “Push engagement continues to work well for many companies. However, the most innovative companies use “pull” engagement strategies to treat their customers like active participants, not passive recipients of information, in their businesses. When you want to learn the latest news from Apple, you visit the Apple Store online or where you live.”

It continued to state that by becoming the go-to source for information, it can inspire customers to use email, messengers, social media and their phones to ask for advice.

For example, if inflation is in the news, publish an article reminding customers it is a good time to review financial plans against forecasted inflation rates. Incidentally, the OutRank solution enables teams to calculate several economic scenarios and demystify inflation.

Kidbrooke explained that at any stage of a customer’s life, an interactive tool can be developed to encourage them to examine their allocation, according to age, income, risk appetite, predicted age of retirement, etc. OutRank can help make these steps easy to understand for all customers.

It concluded, “Engaging with customers in a way that encourages dialogue without any jargon or assumptions of financial knowledge is a winning strategy. People should be able to plan their savings and investment journey with confidence and optimism. You don’t need to know what a stochastic variable is to plan your financial future.

“With OutRank, we keep it simple, transparent and accessible, with a seamless end-to-end customer experience. A little more talk with customers really can create value and can foster loyalty to your brand.”

Read the full blog post here.

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