Mask mandates are being lifted across the country. California, New Jersey, Connecticut, Delaware, Oregon, Illinois, and Rhode Island have announced plans to lift their statewide mask mandates or school mask mandates, and more states have indicated they will revisit mask requirements in the near future.
If you have been holding back on making investments to drive new ways your advisors can communicate with investors when COVID-19 restrictions fade and life returns to normal, you might want to revisit those planning assumptions.
A survey by market research firm Engine of 1000 individuals who currently use a financial advisor in the United States and Canada provides some quantitative support for what we all felt in our gut: investor communication preferences have undergone a lasting transformation from the COVID-19 pandemic. Those communication changes put in place to help investors and advisors adapt to stay-at-home mandates and social distancing rules are likely to remain long after those rules become a distant memory.
Some interesting results:
- 57% of investors report changing how they communicated with their advisors, and 62% of them expected to maintain these new communication methods entirely or partially after the pandemic ends.
- 59% of millennial investors were most likely to use video chat with their advisor.
- 79% of investors said that the frequency of communication with their advisors increased during the pandemic.
Layer this on top of research conducted in August 2020 by 8 Acre Perspective Corp., which highlighted increasing the focus on advisor marketing technologies and digital advertising to increase lead generation and new client acquisition, and it’s becoming clear that the old way of finding and interacting with investors is dying.
So, if you are responsible for giving your advisors the tools they need to succeed post-pandemic, here are some things to think about:
- How can you connect the digital experience to your other channels?
- What are the top digital concerns from your clients/prospects?
- What are the leading practices for applying behavioral science principles to attract and engage new clients digitally?
- What infrastructure do you need for data / event / omni-channel management to support client/investor insight?
- How can you support relationship/trusted advisor interactions digitally?
We are talking about real-time customer journey orchestration, an approach used by customer-centric enterprises to improve journey outcomes in real time by taking the most relevant interactions in the context of each customer’s goals and their overall experience. Customer journey orchestration enables wealth management firms to engage prospects and clients at optimal points along their journeys, in real time, and through the most effective channels.
Journey orchestration goes beyond traditional personalization techniques. It leverages customer journey data from every channel, source, or system. This way, each interaction reflects your client’s entire experience with your organization – not just the current interaction. As a result, every moment of engagement is highly personalized for each individual because the interactions a firm takes are based on each client’s prior experience.
Perficient focuses on helping wealth management firms use their knowledge about a client/investor to tailor a better, more relevant experience to their needs. We have the industry and technical expertise to leverage contextual, behavioral, and persona-based inputs to determine where a client is in their journey and best support their “next best action.” Clients expect it, the data is available, and the technology needed to make it happen is within reach. The best personalization strategies include knowing how – and when – to apply what you know about clients. It’s all about offering clients choices about the sort of experiences and services they want.
If you are interested in how we can help you humanize the digital experience post-pandemic, contact us.
