The more personal post-Covid client-adviser conversations

As the pandemic recedes, the customer relationship has changed for nearly every business, from grocery stores to financial advisers.

Barbara sits at the new drive-thru to pick up groceries. Asked if she likes the new way of shopping she replies, “Before Covid, I would have never let anyone shop for me ... but the convenience is great. I think I will only go into the store when I want to prepare a special weekend dinner.”

Dan has been working at home for over a year. He admits to Zoom fatigue, but says, “I get so much done at home. I am not sure I need to be in the office five days a week.”

Katie is amazed at how video consults have eased check-ins with her toddler’s pediatrician. Almost giddy with excitement she remarks, “We are able to see the doctor from home without the hassle of packing up my little one, getting him into the car, and sitting in the waiting room. I mean, wow, it’s a game changer!” 

So what is the future of the client-adviser office meeting?

As Jim Ciprich of northern New Jersey’s RegentAtlantic notes, “We work in a relationship business, and while technology like Zoom has enabled us to safely visit with clients during the pandemic, I feel at this point many of my clients are looking forward to meeting face-to-face.”

The MIT AgeLab’s Preparing for Longevity Advisory Network research platform recruits thousands of advisers worldwide to participate in research on the future of advice. Nearly all agree that having clients back in the office is critical, and that client office meetings will not be the same.

PERSONAL MATTERS MATTER

Office client meetings that begin with pleasantries and then quickly delve into financial matters are a thing of the past. Findings from interviews with other advisers indicate that future office visits will be characterized by conversations that go beyond money. In-person office meetings will be more intimate, inspiring and interactive than ever before. Advisers are finding that the pandemic has primed clients to have more intimate conversations about emotionally charged topics, such as health or even downsizing from the family home.

“While we have found our process to be enormously successful in helping clients, we have also found that our conversations have always been less about money and more about life,” says adviser Eliot Weissberg at The Investors Center in Avon, Connecticut.

Three Oaks Wealth Management’s Nicholas Serenyi notes that unlike conversations during the Great Recession that focused primarily on finance, conversations during Covid have intensified the focus on the client’s “own mortality,” driving more discussions about estate planning, long-term care insurance and life insurance.

But while clients are ready to discuss these topics the conversations are not always suited for video. RegentAtlantic’s Jim Ciprich observes that “some content just does not translate” well online.

INTIMATE, INSPIRING AND INTERACTIVE CONVERSATIONS

The post-pandemic client-adviser office meeting offers the opportunity to go beyond transactional conversations and review meetings that have worked well online. Advisers are finding that clients are now more willing to have conversations that go deeper. With transactional business easily done online, advisers will be free to use office meetings to excite and delight their clients by serving as curators of possible retirement futures rather than limiting themselves to finance discussions.

For example, clients are indicating that the standard question, ‘How’s your health?’ is an opportunity to have a comprehensive conversation about specific health conditions or the health status of immediate family.

Victoria, British Columbia-based CIBC Wealth Management adviser Luke Kratz observes that in-person meetings are critical to inspiring clients to consider the possibilities in retirement. Kratz uses a process he calls Financial Life Planning that engages clients to translate their financial plans into what their life might be, such as where they might live and what they might do. Client-adviser office meetings are now more likely to be about inspiring clients to go well beyond imagining their futures as one of the many trite, but limiting, images of retirement life on beaches and golf courses.

Key Financial’s Patti Brennan says that while online engagement has produced a record year for her firm, office visits remain vital. In person she is better able to engage with clients and dive deeper into their real retirement objectives and concerns. The Philadelphia-based adviser describes how she uses her conference room as more than a meeting place, but as a work room where she can inspire, probe, and help clients imagine their retirement possibilities — deep and nuanced conversations best done in person. 

[More: Pandemic likely to reshape adviser-client communications, survey finds]

Client-adviser conversations typically center around taking the actions necessary to allay fears of running out of money in retirement. Those conversations will always be critical, but George Fraser at Phoenix-based Retirement Benefits Group argues that conversations must be about more than reducing anxiety.

Fraser and his colleagues have truly interactive conversations that give clients “hope” instead of fear. Fraser uses office meetings to translate the ambiguous, and often intimating, language of percentages of income into discussions about “saving pennies” — thereby reassuring the client that for just a penny, or a few pennies, they can achieve a secure retirement future without making major life sacrifices today. Moreover, in-person conversations allow Fraser and his team to have interactive educational sessions with clients about Social Security and other complex benefits topics that clients may not fully understand.

In-person sessions enable advisers to really connect with the client in a way that video meetings cannot. “The most rewarding part of our work is the reaction from a participant, smiles, tears, hugs, when they understand they are going to be okay because of our meeting — not emotions we can get virtually!” Fraser said.

For more than a year every industry from consumer products, retail and the law to health care has had to learn new ways to engage and excite customers, clients and patients. In a post-pandemic advisory marketplace, financial professionals calling clients back to the office must ask, “What’s my wow?” Leading advisers are not just rethinking the many modes in which they can engage clients, but what they discuss, when and how. Advisers have found that transaction-based and check-in conversations have been successful online — freeing time for the office meeting to be an opportunity to deepen their client relationship and to make in-person the new premium.

[More: Customer service: The most boring, and important, aspect of your firm]

Joseph Coughlin is director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology AgeLab.