Audio Transcript

To wrap up the Objectway series on Customer Experience in Wealth Management, I’d like to challenge you with a statement: managing wealth is easier than managing experiences. And I’d go a step further: Customer Experience is at least as important as preserving and growing the wealth – if not even more!

How come? Why is it more important?
Here we need to take a good look at what is Customer Experience, actually? Many believe that this is about the quality of service and the treatments our valued customers receive when interacting with our business. But it’s a lot more – experience is also:

• our adverts or digital media posts, which triggered their interest before they even thought of becoming customers. The look and feel, the language, the intuitive impact of the message.
• the ambiance of our office or the place we choose to meet them, the light and colours, the sounds, aromas and tactile response of the furniture. Not to mention the tea or coffee served and the smiles (or otherwise) of people they encounter.
• it is also the design of our websites and mobile apps, not just the beautiful graphics but also the ease of navigation and speed of getting to what we need to learn or do there. Or the annoying long waits between pages, confusing texts, or buttons that do nothing when you click them.
• not least, an especially important experience is our product and service: the performance of investments we make on their behalf or advise them to make, the outcomes they receive from using our financial services. Here we got to the starting question: to deliver great experience you must provide superb wealth management! And all other things I mentioned, and even more…

Am I too demanding? Yes and no: you can deliver great portfolio performance to keep clients happy, ignore all the other ‘fluff’ and be forgiven because the client is making money. That would work if you were RyanAir or EasyJet. Wealth is a different game and HNWI clients deserve – and expect – more. And, given the commoditisation of investment instruments and management techniques, the last frontier of competitive differentiation is becoming the comprehensive experience delivered by firms in our sector.