Ron Shevlin Archives - JPNicols.com

(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

–

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.

—

• 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.

–

• 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.

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.