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(Reblogged from Finovate)
fintech
Clients Do Not Want Help. Until They Do.
(This was originally published as a guest post for my friends at the management consulting and strategic communications firm Beyond the Arc: Understanding how customers really want help.)
On the same day I published a post about the sometimes disappointing allure of technology (Technology is Not a Silver Bullet), the always insightful Discerning Technologist Brad Leimer shared a a post from The Financial Brand on LinkedIn (Big Study Examines Retail Channel Preferences).
The study, sponsored by Cisco, showed strong consumer preferences for non-branch channels such as web, mobile, phone and ATM for many types of interactions. However, branches were the preferred channel for such things as “Apply for a loan” and “Support from banking representative”. (See below)
What explains the stark differences? First of all, as Ron Shevlin of Snarketing 2.0 says, just because a person visits a branch for help or to complete a transaction doesn’t necessarily mean that they prefer to do it that way. It may mean that the web site or phone representative was inadequate to meet the client’s needs.
Secondly, and not to get all snarkety myself (that’s Ron’s sole province), but clients really don’t want your help. Until they do.
Results Not Process
Much has been written about the so-called “customer experience”– everything that a customer comes in contact with during their lifetime interaction with your brand; direct and indirect, obvious and subtle, conscious and unconscious.
Successful firms correctly attempt to measure the expressed and latent needs of clients. The best keep in mind the words of the great ad man David Ogilvy, who has been variously quoted as saying multiple versions of “People don’t want quarter-inch drill bits, they want quarter-inch holes.”
I have long found inspiration in the work of now-retired Harvard Business School professor David H. Maister, and I have been using some variation of his 2×2 matrix below for at least a decade.
Maister uses a healthcare analogy to describe the key operational and profitability metrics of different departments, and I have found it useful to help financial firms think through their various activities and how they provide value to their clients.
Pharmacy (Low Touch/Standardized Process)
For a financial firm, these are the things that just need to get done quickly and accurately. For the most part clients have little preference as to how.
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• Account Opening
• Transactions
• Balance Reporting
• Transfers
• Basic Service Issues
–
Nursing (High Touch/Standardized Process)
These are items that might need a little more hand-holding, even though the processes and protocols are still well defined, and good client-service skills can go a long way to improving client satisfaction.
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• Standard Credit
• Product Advice
• Estate Settlement
• Discretionary Trust
• Complex Issues
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Brain Surgery (Low Touch/Specialized Process)
These activities require specialized skills, but the real value comes from applying the expertise, not necessarily from the advisor/client relationship.
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• Custom Credit
• Asset Allocation
• Basic Trust Admin
• Complex Assets
• Basic Estate Plans
–
Psychotherapy (High Touch/Specialized Process)
For financial firms (and especially wealth management firms), this is the top of the value chain. It’s what happens here that drives most loyalty/at-risk measures. Diagnosis is key, and it is from here where brain surgery may be prescribed.
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• Goal Setting
• Financial Planning
• Complex Estates
• Succession Matters
• Nonfinancial Issues
• Moral Support
–
Bringing it All Together
Clients may well be willing to use your new app for certain things, utilize your web site to download transactions and contact your call center to change their address. Those things may improve your operating margins– as long as they work.
The face-to-face interactions that do the most to improve the client experience are not the ones that solve the issues that could have been (and should have been) solved via other channels (See two surefire ways to irritate your customers. It’s the ones where they are really receiving the time and attention from someone who understands their situation and their goals and is helping them get to where they want to be.
Clients don’t want your help. Until they do.
5 Tips to Find True Innovators | Inc.com
The Keys to Hiring Effective Innovators
1. Intellectually Restless:
Great innovators get a thrill out of defining a bold vision and then wrestling with the data, insights, barriers, and opportunities to unlock what needs to be true to get there.
2. Inspiring Rather Than Convincing:
Applicants who come from traditional consulting are often proficient at framing opportunities, yet unaccustomed to creating outcomes. We want people who can do both. Those who recognize that innovation, by its very nature, is at odds with certainty. Breakthroughs can’t be proven. They need to be envisioned and driven.
3. Proven Ability to Drive Innovation:
There’s a big difference between recognizing a great innovation and understanding how to create a great innovation. Unlike financial markets, past performance in innovation is, more often than not, an indicator of future performance.
4. Have Scaled a Peak:
We look for greatness in some aspect of an applicant’s life: successful entrepreneur, published writer, Ivy League graduate, Division I athlete, etc. The metric of success is less important than the success itself. We want people who are comfortable defining a high-order goal and then doing what it takes to accomplish it.
5. Willing to Commit to Something Bigger Than Themselves:
This is important on two levels. At a firm level, we want people who are excited by the belief that we’re on a mission to create a fundamentally new type of business. On a personal level, we want talent who believes in something that doesn’t exist today. This type of belief is the core of innovation. Therefore, we look for candidates who’ve already demonstrated their commitment to a higher-order ambition. It can be sports, religion, a philosophy, or a charity. The object of devotion is much less important than the proven willingness to invest passionately with a group of people to realize a dream.
Read the entire article here:
Two Surefire Ways to Irritate Your Customers
This is my shortest post ever. I have sat in numerous financial services conference sessions over the past several days as I try to contemplate all of the ways that the megatrends of social, mobile, analytics and cloud might impact the future of the client-advisor relationship. One of the biggest things for me is to figure out is how strongly Generation Y‘s current preference for self-service will prevail as they face new life stages and increasing financial complexity in the future.
There are lots of conflicting research, opinions and predictions, and I struggle to assimilate all of the data, but I think I can safely say that either of these two methods will irritate the wealth management clients of the future as much as they do today:
- Force your clients into self-service options when they want someone to help them.
- Force your clients into getting someone to help them when they want to do it themselves.
You’re welcome. My consulting bill is in the mail.
Social and Channels and Brands, Oh My!
Hopefully readers can forgive me if I sometimes seem a little disjointed in my writings.
I attend wealth management conferences and find myself the only person talking about digital marketing, social media and engaging clients across multiple delivery channels. Then I attend social media and financial technology events and find myself the only person talking about wealth management, at least in terms of the kind that involves financial advisors actually helping clients.
Then I read, as I have referenced before, Ron Shevlin‘s BS-busting work on his blog Snarketing 2.0 and he skewers the very notion that some of this stuff even matters:
And so what if banks do create a “consistent brand experience across all channels”? Do you think bank customers will be lulled into forgetting the other issues and problems with their <sic> that they face?
He is right, of course. But I’ll come back to that.
Last week I sat in a room in New York full of bright wealth management executives to discuss important ways that firms can improve client service and grow their businesses. Booz & Company showed research that wealth management was one of the bright spots (along with payments) for growth in a sluggish financial industry. Their research showed an expected growth in the wealth management business of 3x GNP growth. That sounds pretty good until you realize that GNP growth has averaged about 1.5% over the past ten quarters.
Voice of the client largely missing
There were lots of good discussions on lots of relevant topics, but what struck me the most was how internally focused our industry has become. Maybe we have always been this way. Aside from my friends at the VIP Forum and WISE Gateway, most of the discussion was about the firms, their people, the investment strategies and the sales and marketing, rather than the clients themselves.
I can’t count the number of surveys and studies that show the increasing expectations of integrated mobile and web offerings, and the affluent have higher adoption rates than the general population. Yet someone in the room actually said out loud that they haven’t done anything with mobile technology because their clients haven’t been asking for it.
Henry Ford famously said (or perhaps never said, according to Patrick Vlaskovits in the Harvard Business Review) “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” Whether he said it or not, the apocryphal quote highlights both sides of the same coin for me.
Listen to your clients. But also use your own intuition to design something to solve their problems in a better, faster or cleaner way. That is the essence of innovation, and what is too often lacking in financial services. (See Five Things Banks Can Learn from Start-Ups.)
Don’t repaint when you need to fix a cracked foundation
Which brings me back to Ron Shevlin’s comments. In my mind, it’s not that financial firms shouldn’t strive to “create a consistent brand experience across all channels” (or engage in social media, or build their brand), it’s that too many firms are focused on the window dressing instead of addressing the core issues that consumers want us to address. Shevlin’s closing comments are spot on:
If, however, the focus was on “fixing problems” or “redesigning” processes and interactions, then maybe funds would flow to the places where they’re really needed.
But you’re not going to effectively prioritize those investment alternatives by asking consumers about their channel preferences.
I am now in Boston and off to another conference, surely filled with bright people. Let’s see who’s really focused on the clients…
More here next week.
Finovate Spring 2012 Recap
Sorry to take a little while to get this posted, but I had an important Mothers Day post to write.
Last week I attended the fifth annual Finovate financial technology conference in San Francisco. This year’s event was the largest yet, with nearly 1200 entrepreneurs, bankers, investors, analysts and FinTech fans experiencing 63 product demos in 2 days. A few trends I noted:
SoMoLo+Big Data= Deals
As usual, there were lots of innovative companies in the payments space, displaying all kinds of creative ways to move dollars and data from wherever they are to wherever you want them to be. The SoMoLo (social, mobile, local) trend is very evident here, and increasingly being mashed up with Big Data to create specialized Deals– merchant funded rewards, targeted offers, digital coupons, customer loyalty programs, geo-rewards, geo-offers, card-linked offers, offer wallets, etc.
Perhaps one of the most customizable is Giftly, which allows you to gift just about anything from anywhere to anyone– your gift becomes a credit on the recipient’s credit card for a place and amount of your choosing. For instance, you can respond to a friend’s check-in at the local pub with a round on you from across the globe. Pretty cool.
Another very customizable card product is the GlobalVCard, which allows you to issue single or limited use MasterCard numbers for ultra-secure payments. Users can even positively or negatively restrict the types of merchant codes allowed (airlines, restaurants, etc.) and/or limited dollar amounts. Simple and effective user interfaces for iPhone and iPad too. Right now it is only available for CSI MasterCard Corporate Card customers.
Crowdsourcing and White Labeling
There were quite a few white label apps, and as my friend and discerning technologist Bradley Leimer noted on his Twitter feed, it underscores the need for a better user experience in online and mobile banking. Some will leverage their handsome design to help asset hungry banks source new loans, with new social criteria mixed into the underwriting, including OnDeck Capital and Best Of Show winner SoMoLend.
The Gamification of Personal Finance
I have written about my tendency to overuse sports analogies before, but Portfolio Football takes it to a whole new level as personal finance and portfolio management principals are gamified, fantasy football style.
Wall Street Survivor takes a more straight-forward approach, and focuses more on stock trading.
PFM and more for the “Overbanked”
There were lots of great solutions to help empower the “underbanked” (even though analyst and Snarketing 2.0 blogger Ron Shevlin says it’s time to retire that term. As readers of this site know, for better or worse, I have spent most of my career working with the other end of the spectrum. I guess I should call them the “overbanked”.
I am usually somewhat rare at events like this, but I actually heard the term “wealth management” uttered from the stage, not once, but twice. Three of the seven Best Of Show winners involved some form of more sophisticated Personal Financial Management (PFM) tools, including impressive offerings from Personal Capital, MoneyDesktop and iQuantifi.
Also relevant for innovative wealth managers were investor insights from DCisions, a social, communications and collaboration platform manager from Actiance, and a very nice client engagement and management platform “designed by financial advisors for financial advisors” by inStream.
If this trend continues, I won’t be as lonely at future events. That will be good for the wealth management business. I’ve often said that our industry too often makes clients choose between great technology or great people. (Actually, Ron Shevlin would probably approve of the much snarkier way I describe it in person, but I won’t write it here.)
We need to deliver both to be truly excellent.
Congratulations Finovate Spring 2012 Winners!
Congratulations to the Finovate Best of Show winners (in alphabetical order):
All in all a great show, and I enjoyed meeting lots of great people as I explore the intersection of leadership, advice and technology. More of my impressions and my personal favorites coming soon.
Finovate Spring 2012 Preview
This week I will be back in San Francisco attending the Finovate Spring 2012 financial innovation conference.
Finovate is a two-day showcase of the newest financial and banking technology innovations from both established companies and startups. Short company demos of just seven minutes each are presented in back-to-back blasts, and no slides are allowed, so presenters have to focus on the key benefits and what makes their product stand out.
I am looking forward to networking with some old friends and meeting some new ones as I once again take my exploration of leadership, advice and technology on the road.
I will be back here with my notes and observations.
