A client meeting tool that allows advisors to sincerely meet their clients
Financial Advisor Client Meeting Platform
INTRODUCTION
A client discovery tool built around how financial advisors want to work
Our team of four designers and researchers worked with key stakeholders from the client to produce a next-generation platform to aid Financial Advisors in conducting meaningful conversations with their clients. Our solution was built to accommodate the ideal methods for capturing this information as defined by Advisors. We also built in additional functionality highlighted by Advisors in our initial research and testing. These functions included the ability to catalog, share, and synchronize client data with their teams. With this in mind, we worked in-step with the client and did exhaustive testing to guarantee that our solution was tailor-made to the needs of our client and custom-built for the Advisors who would be using the platform.
DISCOVERY 1.0
What we heard from business…
As part of our initial discussions with our Stakeholders, we heard strong sentiments that the client would like their Advisors to digitize the information they had gathered round their clients to aid the business in developing a robust view of their customers. There was a secondary need highlighted to provide more structure around the discovery process, while providing methods to highlight important client information when it was most pertinent to the Advisor.
DISCOVERY 2.0
What we heard from users…
Next we spoke with 6 Advisors to get a better view of how they conduct their current discovery process. We also used these conversations to highlight key goals and pain-points. In our discussions, we highlighted several key findings which aided in building out the initial concepts we would test, including:
For initial discovery conversations, Advisors will utilize questionnaires and informational PDFs to help them guide the conversation.
When working with their teams, Advisors struggle to keep everyone in the office on the same page in reference to the client.
Advisors find that incorporating digital note taking, interactive demonstrations, and too many additional artifacts can be distracting and takes them out of the conversation with their clients.
PROBLEM STATEMENT WORKSHOP
Rallying design and business around their goals
Our design team drafted two initial problem statements in collaboration with the core stakeholders. We took these two problem statements and used them as the basis for a Workshop with the broader team. The goal of this workshop was to confirm the accuracy of these problem statements and refine them were necessary. We also built in additional activities to collect key pain points, user goals, and key areas of opportunity to direct us in our design efforts moving forward.
PROBLEM STATEMENT 1
The problem I suspect is that the current Advisor platform does not support a process to collect client information.
PROBLEM STATEMENT 2
The problem I suspect is Advisors need to enhance and update their current Discovery methods
USER JOURNEYS
Understanding the user’s workflow, end to end.
At this point, the team built out three comprehensive user journeys to act as the foundation for the experience with our future platform. These journeys were built around three specific use cases to ensure that our solution would fit the needs of Advisors coming from various points of familiarity with the client’s discovery process:
JOURNEY 1: LEGACY ADVISOR WHO HAS DISCOVERY DATA, WHICH HASN’T BEEN INCORPORATED IN THE FUTURE-STATE SYSTEM.
JOURNEY 2: AN ADVISOR WHO HAS BEEN USING THE FUTURE-STATE SYSTEM AND HAS THEIR DATA INCORPORATED.
JOURNEY 3: A NEW ADVISOR APPROACHING THE SYSTEM FOR THE FIRST TIME.
CONCEPT TESTING
Distilling our solutions into one experience
Our team took the initial research with the journeys we produced to present 13 separate concepts to the client. From there, we worked with stakeholders to highlight 8 concepts to test with Advisors in our initial concept testing phase. In our first round of testing, we presented these 8 concepts, getting their feedback, and having them rank which of them would be most beneficial to Advisors. From the results of our testing, we selected 4 core concepts that would aid Advisors the most. With these core concepts we constructed a solution based on the user’s needs.
IDEATION
From sketches to screens
Out of our Concept Testing with Advisors, the team took the four highest ranking concepts and built out an experience that wove all the concepts together into one integrated and seamless product. We tested the product across two rounds of testing, comprised of 28 total sessions. At the completion of each round, we iterated our product based on feedback from the Advisors and collaboration with the client stakeholders. The result of which, gave us a product that was specially made to the needs of the Advisors and constructed in an intuitive and usable fashion.
CLIENT MEETING PLATFORM
Our user defined meeting prep platform
The result of our work is a comprehensive platform built to aid Advisors in gathering discovery information around their client. The solution allows users to input their client’s information easily and, when relevant, provide playback of the most pertinent client information when the Advisor needs it. Functionality on the page is broken down between four key elements:
Meeting Prep
Basic Information Card
Total Client Overview
Family Tree
“I’ve been asking for this for a decade so I’m glad you guys are working on it.”
MEETING PREP PANEL
An agenda that gives you something to talk about
The Meeting Prep Module is built two major use cases in mind. Providing Advisors with a view of topics and notes most recently covered with the client, and allowing Advisors to build out an agenda ahead of the next scheduled meeting.
While drafting the agenda, Advisors build out a framework for a notes sheet to help capture relevant client information.
The Meeting Prep Module is also the home for more structured Optical Character Recognition (OCR) documents to aid Advisors in collecting a variety of information.
The framework of the Module is built to allow for advisors to take both freeform notes and collect more structured information. The platform would digitize and categorize both through the build in OCR system.
“Very cool. How could this not be valuable, is really the question?!”
“Getting to know the clients, that’s the fun part. The hard part is what we’re doing with all of that information and processing all of that and getting that into our systems. That’s a pain in the ass right now.”
NOTES SHEET AND OCR UPLOAD
Your meeting notes digitally at your (and your team’s) fingertips
Once an Advisor has finalized their agenda with their team, the platform produces a matching notes sheet synced with the topics highlighted for discussion. Notes taken on this sheet can be photographed and uploaded into the client’s system using integrated OCR functionality. The note sheets and forms would also allow data around categorization, client, date, and author to pre-populate in the system. This process was built out of strong needs highlighted by Advisors to preserve their “legal-pad” note taking process. The team met the users where they lived while providing structure to their process and a low-effort method to digitize and catalog findings from their client meetings.
The OCR functionality was built as an on-going collaboration between the core team and our in-house development team.
“There’s so many… so many advantages to this. The fact that this technology exists and we aren’t using it, drives me insane”
TOTAL CLIENT OVERVIEW
Your entire client relationship, at a glance
The Total Client Overview Module gives Advisors an organized and graphic representation of information gathered to allow them to see an overarching view of the ongoing conversations with their clients. It provides a high-level overview of their client relationship, while allowing Advisors to review and manage their tasks and notes at a granular level.
In testing with Advisors, they wanted this module to not only allow them to see what has been covered with the Client, but also highlight subjects and topics that have not been discussed. The Module would not only be used to let Advisors see a view of the conversations covered with their client, but guide and direct possible conversations in the future.
“This is cool. Super helpful in a client meeting. Really helpful for the team to reference to keep everybody on the same page.”
“It’d be amazing to have a graphic like this. LIke you do a bunch of inputs and then output is this!”
FAMILY TREE
See who matters most to your clients
The Family Tree Module provides Advisors with a complete view of a client’s family. Based on requests from the users, the team also folded in information flagged as the most pertinent (age, occupation). Advisors can input evergreen notes tied to individuals to give Advisors and their teams context on who the individuals are and how best to interact with them.
The Module will sync with the client’s relationship master to pre-populate the family tree and will allow Advisors the ability to edit and adapt as necessary.
“Here’s one of the big reasons I love it. You have to take time to understand the relationships but the visual gives you so much immediately.”
“From a planning perspective, I think it adds a huge value. It not only shows the client that we are planning for them, but also all of their loved ones. And behind the scenes, it helps me to find planning opportunities.”
“Everybody benefits from having that graphic.”
TOTAL CLIENT OVERVIEW
Your entire client relationship, at a glance
The Total Client Overview Module gives Advisors an organized and graphic representation of information gathered to allow them to see an overarching view of the ongoing conversations with their clients. It provides a high-level overview of their client relationship, while allowing Advisors to review and manage their tasks and notes at a granular level.
In testing with Advisors, they wanted this module to not only allow them to see what has been covered with the Client, but also highlight subjects and topics that have not been discussed. The Module would not only be used to let Advisors see a view of the conversations covered with their client, but guide and direct possible conversations in the future.
CONCLUSION
An end to end solution for Advisors and their clients
While working rigorously with our client and testing our product with Advisors every step of the way, the design team has produced a product that is custom built to how Advisors collect and utilize Client discovery data while keeping an eye on how we can bring that process into the future.
Our platform provides a structured flow for Advisors to conduct client meetings while allowing for normalization of Client data with low effort to Advisors and their teams. The platform collects data that can offer Advisors direction and efficiencies in their work, while providing the business with the basis for invaluable data collection around clients. The Platform is also woven into corresponding applications.
The Discovery Platform is a product built from the ground up around how Advisors collect client discovery information while being anchored in the core problem statements defined by the client. It’s a solution that optimizes how Advisors work now, collects data to aid both Advisors and the client, and is flexible enough to adapt to Advisor needs in the future.