Last month, I participated in a webinar hosted by Katie Keir, research and special projects editor at Investment Executive, along with my former colleague Daniele Farinaccia, senior vice-president, distribution and channel management at Sun Life and Jenny MacMillan Brown, vice-president of business development enterprise advisor software at Morningstar.
We discussed this year’s Investment Executive Report Card series results. The series collects qualitative survey responses from advisors, planners and key wealth management leaders across the brokerage, dealer and retail bank channels.
One focus of the webinar was on how well the financial advice industry is faring in the continuing technology transformation.
Although firms continue to make substantial investments in technology, the data showed that a significant gap remains between advisor expectations and advisor satisfaction. Specifically, advisors continue to report a satisfaction gap with tools (including back-office tools, client onboarding tools and client relationship tools), technology training and internal IT support, client account statements and portals and receptiveness to advisor feedback.
Here are five suggestions to improve advisor satisfaction with technology.
1. Focus on a seamless end-to-end technology experience
Firms should be more aware of the importance of a seamless end-to-end technology journey for advisors that includes every step. The journey will be unsatisfactory even if individual pieces of technology are effective, if they are not well integrated.
In fact, the top response to a poll question during the webinar about the biggest barrier for advisors and firms who are looking to adopt new technology was a lack of streamlining across various platforms — 58% of respondents selected that answer. For example, if individual technologies take a different approach or simply use different terminology, the end-to-end experience is inconsistent and problematic.
While this is logical, it’s often difficult in practice to achieve a streamlined experience. Most firms use different technology providers and technologies are constantly being updated or changed. It may be overly onerous and time-consuming to revisit that end-to-end experience each time a new tool is introduced or changes are made to an existing tool, but it is essential to do so at least periodically.
2. Iterate and continuously improve technology in response to advisor feedback
This is different from the periodic end-to-end review. As a firm adopts new technology, it should make it a practice to seek advisor feedback on issues, inconsistencies and even bugs in the technology.
Too often, firms find ways to live with and manually solve a technology issue, rather than tackling the underlying problem. There’s no such thing as a perfect technology, and it’s essential for the tool owner to collect and action feedback from tool users.
3. Advisors should leverage all available technology
Advisors should not be afraid to adopt and leverage every new piece of technology provided by their firm. While some advisors fear that technology will take over their business, it is the opposite.
Today’s technologies, including and perhaps especially AI, provide an invaluable amount of administrative and compliance support, and produce efficiencies that will free up advisors to focus on their clients and their business.
4. Provide tailored and effective training
Many believe that well-built tools require little formal training, as they should be intuitive to use and require minimal how-to training for basic tasks. But that doesn’t mean training is unnecessary.
The training should speak to the objective and principles underlying the technology, so that users will be able to understand the context, adapt to future changes and effectively troubleshoot problems. It should also be tailored to the users and speak to how the technology fits into the end-to-end technology journey.
Once a user is comfortable with the basic features of the technology, training is essential to teach its advanced features. In fact, this is often where the most significant efficiencies can be unlocked.
Firms should resist using off-the-shelf vendor training. Ask vendors to customize training for the firm. This way, they can better support their users and ensure appropriate context for the new technology and its position in the end-to-end flow.
Interestingly, in the webinar poll about the biggest barrier to adopting new technology, the second most popular response among respondents was lack of training — 22% of respondents said so.
5. Utilize change management practices to support adoption
In addition to training, firms need to apply other change management practices to support the effective adoption of new technology. Many firms are ardent users of change management principles in many other areas, yet they’ve been slower to leverage them to support technology changes. Of course, the scale of a change management initiative should be commensurate to the size and impact of the change.
The recommended change management practices include clear communications (including the purpose and value-add of the new technology), the identification of champions to drive adoption, a plan to address resistance to adoption and the establishment of a feedback loop.
By leveraging these ideas, firms will improve the adoption and understanding of the highest and best use of technologies and drive a better return on their significant investments. Advisors will be able to drive efficiencies across their teams and devote more time to their clients and their business.