Take outs:

• Seeing your practice from the other side of the desk is essential if you are to improve your customer experience.
• Netwealth has developed a toolkit to help you achieve just this.
• The goal is to identify new ideas, offers and business models and stay ahead of the market.

Imagine if you could approach your financial advice practice as a mystery shopper, to see it through the eyes of a new prospect.

How do potential customers locate you among the myriad services similar to yours on offer? How appealing and up-to-date is your website, effectively the front door to your practice? How welcoming is the person who answers your phone?

Is it easy to set up an initial meeting with you at a convenient time and place? How tedious is the discovery, fact-finding and profiling process from your customer’s perspective, and how long does it take you to get back to them with an SOA?

The friction factor

Each of these interactions is a touchpoint between you and your prospect/customer and a potential source of pain or frustration, which can cause them to hesitate on their journey towards a closer relationship with you - or even leave. But that also means each touchpoint is an opportunity for you to improve the experience, enhancing customer satisfaction and better securing the relationship.

Successful brands provide friction-free customer experiences of seamlessly connected user-friendly touchpoints, making for a memorable journey. These days, customers have come to expect this level of easy, intuitive interaction with businesses, because so many of the ones we deal with every day have become masters at it - think Amazon, Apple or Uber.

Fresh eyes

Re-evaluating your practice from the point of view of your customer is a way for you to find new ways to enhance your unique customer journey, to adapt and stay ahead of the game.

As Steve Jobs put it, “Get closer than ever to your customers. So close that you tell them what they need well before they realise it themselves.’’

To tap into the wealth of knowledge that you and your team already possess on the subject, Netwealth has developed an Innovation Toolkit to show you how to plan simple, enjoyable workshops designed to identify ideas specific to your customer journey.

The toolkit provides you with a workshop guide and blank customer journey templates to fill in and enables you to approach the exercise from the perspective of different target groups that can be defined by life stage, generation, attitude, financial literacy, wealth products they use, value to your business or anything you choose.

It has been designed so you can ‘get into the heads’ of your customers and honestly map the service you deliver to them from their perspective, from the prospect stage through to discovery, advice, implementation, engagement and consultation, all the way to your annual review process. The only limits to the process are the time you can make available, and your ambition to improve your customer experience.

Customer Journey Map Workshop

Exercises and activities to help you see your customer journeys in a different light

Download workshop

 

Clear understanding

First and foremost, you need to begin with a clear understanding of all the different points at which you interact with your clients. The exercises in the Netwealth Innovation Toolkit will show you how to list them in detail.

They can be broken down into relationship stages. For example, possible touchpoints at the prospect stage of the journey may include Google searches, online ratings and reviews, word of mouth, your website, phone calls and your reception.

Once you’ve established such a list, you need to ask yourself: what goals will a customer have at each of these points? How will they be feeling, what areas of pain or frustration would they experience and what could you do to reduce this?

What might delight a customer at each of these touchpoints? In other words, are there parts of your customer journey which are already great that you can draw more attention to. In what ways are you better than your competitors?

And finally, where are the areas of opportunity for you along your customer journey? What new ideas can you generate to raise your profile and maximise client retention and profit at each stage?

Team effort

The Netwealth Innovation Toolkit suggests that this exercise is best done by splitting your team in small groups of two or three, each working on different segments and then sharing their ideas. Encourage them to choose targets they know intimately or feel passionate about.

It is important to remember that there are no right or wrong answers, and to get everyone engaged in full and frank discussions - spirited debates are even better!

The best answers are collaborative, and teams should be encouraged to share their ideas so everyone gets an opportunity to learn or to suggest alternative ways of thinking and to flesh out ideas so they can be actioned

New opportunities

How do you know when you have a great idea? When it generates excitement, solves a real problem, creates new opportunities or helps people achieve more with less. And importantly, when the numbers stack up and it can be delivered.

Smart businesses are always looking to the future to identify new trends. Truly exceptional businesses are brave enough to experiment with new ideas, offers and business models to ensure that they stay ahead of the market.

Download the Netwealth Innovation Toolkit now to begin enhancing your customer journey.