AdviceTech Podcast #50 – Feature: Automation v Client Experience – Transcript

Peita Diamantidis
Hello, and welcome to the Ensombl AdviceTech Podcast. I’m Peita Diamantidis. And this week we’re diving into our second AdviceTech feature episode, where we’re going to discuss sort of broader issues. And any ideas the industry is facing, you know, what we’re dealing with what we’re coming up with, as it relates to tech, with the absolute promise that next week, we’ll return to our regular programming, and we’ll dive into a specific app for you. Now, today’s featured topic is this tension between building scale or using automation versus designing amazing experiences for our clients. And who better to have this conversation with a gentleman who has been an advisor himself has worked in a dealer group. And in fact, in the last few years, has founded two businesses. It’s not just one business, two businesses, one building websites for financial advisors and the other consulting on all things, process improvement and technology solutions. Thank you so much for joining me on the show, Patrick.

We were just saying it’s been so long since we’ve actually seen each other. Well, even virtually, it’s been far too long. So 100% is far too long. two peas in a pod? Well, yeah, we both think the same way about a lot of things. So before we dive in and start debating things, then let’s just get to know you through your use of technology. What’s your most used emoji? Do you even use emojis?

Patrick Flynn
Yes, I use emojis. And I like to consider myself an early adopter of emojis. Really? Yes, yes. However, I do keep it extremely simple. So literally, happy face sad face. Just if you if you think of, you know, just the absolute classics out there crying face a bit too much, perhaps. That’s about it. It helps tweak time. That’s what I use it for.

Peita Diamantidis
yeah, awesome. And what about your smartphone? I mean, we just are so addicted to these things that we just can’t do without them if you had to wipe everything off your smartphone and just keep three apps, which would you keep?

Patrick Flynn
So really good question. So one tragic leap, perhaps would be Asana. So I use that as a task management tool. It’s definitely really easy for just shifting things, assigning things, moving things around just as and when I think about them, so I’m not making a note, but I’m taking it all the way through to action on my phone. Yeah, yeah, perhaps slightly. Sadly, I do love that. I used to save Twitter for this, because I really liked Twitter for when I just had, you know, 30 seconds or a minute. And I just wanted a little bit of Mental Floss. However, I’ve recently transitioned that back to Reddit. Because I’m getting off spending, I’ve seen a lot more junk in my feed lately. So I picked that back to Reddit, so that I can just get a little bit of you know, tech tips or whatever it is, whatever mood I happen to be in, I get really good filters out of that. Nice. So that’s that’s one there. And then lastly, also, perhaps tragically is teams. And naturally, I’ve got team members that are in different parts of the world at all different times. So I am finding myself using that, which is something I probably do need to scale back a little bit on, but I can’t help myself at the moment.

Peita Diamantidis
Yeah, yeah, that’s yeah, that’s fair enough. That’s fair enough. Have you signed up for threads?

Patrick Flynn
No, I’ve I’ve avoided everything matter for since inception. I’ve never had a proper Facebook account. I don’t care to start now.

Peita Diamantidis
Yeah, fair enough. Otherwise, I’m not in that ecosystem.

Patrick Flynn
Yeah. And I’m never going to be I am on the waitlist for blue sky. We’ll see. I don’t think I’m famous enough to get there just yet. But you know, maybe after this podcast, or maybe I’ll go straight through.

Peita Diamantidis
Exactly. Maybe we both thought no, I just don’t see myself ever being. Alright, so. Exactly. Exactly. Maybe, maybe, maybe listeners, you know, talk about us more, please. So we can get.

Patrick Flynn
We need the cloud.

Peita Diamantidis
We were lying on you out there, please. All right. So this tension, there’s tension between automation and experience and quality experience, I think. And you actually pointed this out as we were sort of prepping to have this chat that we probably need to sort of define what we each think automation means because that’s probably an important nuance, right? What are you when you hear the word automation or when you use it? What are you implying or meaning by that?

Patrick Flynn
Well, there’s what most people think of but when I think of automating, I really think about anyway, you can improve effectiveness without adding manual input. Can actually it’s very easy to call clients more. That’s clearly the opposite of automation. But some things you can do that just improve client outcomes and Mack, and I may not even need to be technology based. They can be literally anything where there’s just no human involved to improve that outcome.

Peita Diamantidis
Yeah, yeah. I’m similar. And in fact, I sort of take it a bit further to mean that even making the decision to delegate or or outsource is almost on a journey of automation. Like it’s a way of thinking that you’re starting to think in little pieces and handing off because it’s, it’s, it’s almost always broken. When somebody goes from not doing any delegation to fully automating that almost never works, because they’re just not used to that sort of handover and structuring things in little tasks. So I sort of see the even outsourcing is like a first step sometimes. I’m starting to think along those lines. It’s not quite automation, but I think it’s, it’s heading in the right direction. It’s using the right headspace for sure.

Patrick Flynn
Yeah, there’s definitely a hierarchy automation there. And yes, outsourcing is definitely a little bit further down that hierarchy in terms of you don’t want to be outsourcing what you could use technology to fully automate, in a way, which tends to be cheaper. But yeah, it’s definitely part of that journey. And that hierarchy for sure.

Peita Diamantidis
Yeah, for sure. So then, what are we, the plan is I think we can chat about these two sides before we combine them. So, you know, let’s talk about, you know, automation and scale and gaining efficiency. What do you use? And you clearly, I mean, you guys do this all the time. So what are you seeing advanced practices doing out there that is delivering on that scale? Or automation front? What are some wins that they’re having?

Patrick Flynn
It’s a really good question. So I might sort of do the light version, and then the the deep version, because they’re, they’re really at opposite ends of the spectrum. So they’re using some very narrow best in class single purpose tools. That might be a scheduler tool, like a Calendly, or a bookings. It might be something I was looking at a tool a few weeks ago, regarding automating how you collect your PDS has to go into an SOA, really narrow sector or purpose specific items. They’re all really good ideas. And independently, they usually can stack up by themselves. And you’ll get lots of forward thinking advice, as they’ll just go, oh, yeah, that’s a cool little tool. I’ll plug that in, save a little bit, that’s great. And seeing more and more of that, naturally, the ensemble group is really great for sharing those little quick win ideas. And then, and that’s all just become so much more accessible, even in the last three years, or three years. Then there’s the deep stuff. And then that requires heavy investments. So that’s really looking at what I’m seeing predominantly is using existing tech, taking a look at that making sure it’s the right tech, and then whatever, that those key elements of your tech stack been just really investing in the configuration, the functionality that’s in there, and all the other little things that that support that. So when you’ve got those sorts of automations, that it’s time consuming to invest in, but the benefits of investing in that now sort of starting to make more more and more sense to people. So little things where some of it is stuff you could have done 20 years ago, yes. Where it might be, you have an email template for also you have a script for when you call a client to book a review meeting. And then if they don’t answer the phone, you have an email template to say, hey, we tried to call you and you didn’t answer, whether that’s automated or not. The templates actually the bigger time saving than the than the automatic sending. Yeah, then you have, we tried again, and there’s a new email to say, Hey, we’ve tried you for a second time. And then there’s a third one for maybe the third and final or maybe it gets escalated to and advice or in the voice needs to be different. But again, it’s another email template and other script. And all those little things are really technology agnostic. But as people are increasingly looking at their tech stack, whatever that happens to be, there’s so much that you can do now

Peita Diamantidis
isn’t there. And it’s it’s some, I mean, we’ve got lots of gold from little things like you’re saying it’s like picking up all the little flecks and bringing them together to make this whole gold bar of value, you know, so, I mean, one of the things we’ve done and I’m now perpetually on the hunt for this is shortcuts or hyperlinks. So in your CRM, we’ve added a button that takes direct from our CRM to our Google Drive folder for that client. So we’ve bothered to go in and put all those in and that can be a bit manual initially, but we’ve put all that into now the team can just go straight through to the folder they need, you know, all those sort or a shortcut to, you know, within a certain type of type of task that’s a part of a workflow. It’s got the shortcut to reference materials you’re always going to need for that thing, right or even into your intranet, where it’s the reminder of what the process is and the things you need to check like, it’s, we’re just embedding those shortcuts everywhere. And not only does it get that value in terms of repeat repetition, but also it means you can get people up to scratch a lot faster. Because they don’t have to know that I mean, in the old days, and you are far too young to notice. But in the old days, when you learn a system, you had to learn the backslash, F, double to nine, backslash this to try and get to the right menu for what you wanted to do. And we still almost behave a bit like that with systems where you have to learn the, you know, all the dropdowns and all the place to find things and like, I’m trying to get rid of all of that, you know, sort of, it’s just intuitive. And the staff can just click through to things because it’s right there in front of them what they need.

Patrick Flynn
Yeah, and it sounds like you’re doing one of my little favorite things, which is progressive disclosure, so you’ve got a high level version of it. And that’s all an experience person would need to be their little reminder. But if they’re a newer team member, or they just haven’t done this process, or maybe they’re an advisor, who’s trying to self serve at 6pm, on a Thursday night for a meeting that they’ve got on Friday morning, then there’s a little bit of extra guidance that, you know, they’re gonna need, because they’re just ridiculously rusty on this stuff.

Peita Diamantidis
Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. And we’ve even got, I mean, we’re lucky with this error, and we have that we can do this, but we were realizing that, you know, there’s certain fields in a CRM that you don’t need very often, but when you do need it, you really need it. So, you know, a new client, or deceased client, like they see certain things, we’re gonna wish I found that sooner, you know, and I might have changed my behavior. And so we’ve got, you know, the banner, at the top of the login for that client, in our system changes color for just a couple of things. Awesome. So that, you know, when you open it, like, oh, clearly new client, you know, like, it’s, it’s that sort of stuff. And it sounds I know, probably to the listener, it sounds like really, is that meaningful? It really is. It shortcuts the brain, the team don’t need to go and look and check. And oh, I forgot to check or, you know, it’s just straight in and you know, exactly, this is a new client, okay, this is a way I need to behave, or this is the thing I need to check all that sort of stuff. So, you know, all those little things can make a huge difference.

Patrick Flynn
It’s, it’s funny, it’s a modern version of so many old things where you might have had different color folders. Different Yep. I have been

Peita Diamantidis
around doesn’t. Remember, you’d like the file systems with all those stickers and the letters and you’d have a different one on it. Because of the thing that Yeah, absolutely. All trying to just make it to just shortcut thinking that you don’t need to repeatedly do you know, it’s just you can just dive straight in. Yeah, absolutely. And I think it’s interesting, isn’t it? I think the for lots of people, they might think they’ve got to embark on a big system project. And sometimes I wonder whether knocking off a few of these little a wins gets you a bit of a taste, or they get you Oh, wait a minute. And you can start to save some time. And I think potentially or you and you can tell me whether you agree, you then make better decisions on the big project because you’ve got a better feel for where value sets and what you’re looking for.

Patrick Flynn
Absolutely. And whether you take it as a snowball opportunity, and we do this when we’re doing our process improvement work all the time, everybody comes to us and says I’ve got no time to do that extra thing that will help me next year at next review. This year. I don’t have time for that. So we always have to find a time saver first, before we can invest it back. Yeah. And usually we’re looking for, we might say we’ve done a process review, we’ve been able to save you time at steps one, two, and three. But step four is going to need to be a little bit longer because we want to improve our client experience or something like that. But we just gave you that time, and more in any other time savings. So it can be positive for the snowballing. Or it can be like you said for that realization that oh, you know what? Investing gave me an ROI. That was really nice. Yeah, I can do that again and get more.

Peita Diamantidis
And it’s interesting. Whenever I do any speaking gigs on the stuff that I paint awake, and I save some time initially, and I just can’t go past email, we spend so much time sitting in our inboxes like it’s the master of us. I mean, we sort of treat our inbox like it’s the boss. They’re the one and wait a minute. This is a tool that you’re meant to be using. You’re the boss, you know. Stop behaving like you work in the mailroom. This is crazy. And I think some of the winds if you can get really structured on the way you do it using filters, all sorts of stuff, then you can free up hours a day, like it’s a little horrifying.

Patrick Flynn
Even even just outlook rules. So it’s the simplest thing. Everybody’s got it. It’s right there. And you’re just going you know what, there’s this thing that comes in all the time and I want it available when I want it and I don’t want it the rest of the time. Yes, sticking in a folder. It’s the simplest, most basic outlook roll you could possibly have right now to try.

Peita Diamantidis
It does. And I mean, there’ll be things that we all forward automatically, like there’s a team member that looks after that, and we fought it. That’s what rules for. You don’t need to look at it. Now, you could always tell the team when you get one of these, if you have a question about this, this and this, come and see me, but you’ve taken yourself out of the bottleneck, you know, when you don’t need to look at it. So I’ve got to admit, I think you know, if the listeners out there going, Yeah, but how am I going has been telling you stuff? Well, email, rules, whatever it is, for your filters, whatever it is, for your tool, use email, please invest some time, watch some YouTube channel stuff and just learn some tricks. Because I honestly, if it’s not an hour a day, I’ll be stunned in terms of savings. If you get that done? Well,

Patrick Flynn
I do find when you’ve got a good workflow management system that isn’t sending too many notifications, you’ve configured it appropriately. And I’ve written literally a whole blog just on that one topic of too many notifications. If you got it right, a lot of the time, you don’t need to know everything. But it’s great to look back when you want it. Yes, if it’s not an email, which is usually a joke to search, the fact that you can go, Hey, I’ve got something in Asana, and it’s about updating our FSGs. Because whatever is changed, there’s a bunch of things that two or three different people are sourcing, somebody’s getting the new photo for the advisor profile, somebody’s just confirming the details for the qualifications, whatever it might be, you don’t need to be saved on all of that. You just need to be able to look into it. And if you don’t like what you see, you want to read back. But you don’t want to know all the time. Yes,

Peita Diamantidis
yes. And it is there’s a mindset shift there. That interestingly, I think for most listeners, if their advisors might not fall into this trap quite as much, if you’re in corporates, they definitely do where, but I want to know everything that’s happening. So you can’t, because if you do, you’re not doing your job. Like if you’re watching what everybody else is doing, you aren’t doing what you’re meant to be doing. So to your point, just even if you set a little 10 minute, you know, meeting for yourself each day where you just go into Asana, or whatever it is, and just have a look that is better than letting your email inbox run your day. You know, and it just it’s it’s crazy making stuff. And it’s, it’s a habit we’ve all accidentally fallen into. And the tool was never built to run our days. It’s basically a clever fax machine, you know, like it’s not, it’s not actually a great to do it. Like I know that lots of people use it that way. And there’s structures and complex ways you can do that. But they’re not. It’s not actually designed for that. And so we should stop expecting it to which brings me actually to the next sort of hot topic that comes up, or I think is going to be coming up more I know that there’s a lot of conversation Oh, excuse me, listener for bringing my microphone in there. Waving of hands clearly excited. But there’s a lot of talk about client portals. were worried about cybersecurity with email and all valid. The thing that’s interesting, and I’m curious about what you guys do, or what you’ve helped clients with is, well, we also use email for internal comms, right? There’s a lot of emails that go fly around a business between everybody, what are you seeing advice practices doing on that front if they’re trying to move off email because of everybody’s concerns about the risk that’s inherent.

Patrick Flynn
So first of all, internal email is much easier to manage. From a cybersecurity standpoint, you can ensure that anything that’s running internally is encrypted and managed in a particular way that will keep them very, very different to what you’re sending out to some random server. So that that definitely doesn’t need to have the same level of concern. But it really builds to the point you were making before of it’s not just about security, it’s also about how you communicate effectively. I think, I think there are some things where you should be sending out notifications, perhaps via email, perhaps, maybe not, it’s arguable. But then you’re directing to say a SharePoint where you’re saying, hey, this policy has been updated. You can see the update here. And email is not the best place for that update. That update should be something that’s there centrally, it’s there. For current staff, it’s there for future staff, it’s there for everybody who’s away that day. It’s there in perpetuity. You should be directing to those communication tools, rather than declaration via email. Yeah. Same goes for whatever your advice base CRM happens to be. If you’re using that internally, you’re tracking everything there internally, you’re communicating internally there, then the device can get hit by a bus. You don’t need to have access to their email to be able to see what’s going on. It’s all there. And if in five years time, there’s a complaint. It’s very easy, where the staff have left the business, whatever your archive rules happen to be. If So they’re and these, everybody knows this stuff. And everybody knows that, it’s that they should be communicating in ways that if it’s for a client isn’t the advice, CRM, if they’re trying to run a business, and they’ve got projects, use the some sort of project management and task management tool. And the real challenge is the discipline of the change rather than what’s the best tech for that. Because really, I love Asana. But you can use Trello, you can use monday.com, you write a whole bunch, you need

Peita Diamantidis
to play until one of them you like, Whoa, that was awesome. Okay, good. Use that one. Down to you, how you think how you like, it’s actually quite personal that the task management when I find, and look, I’m, I’m with you there, I think. I mean, we use Slack, occasionally. So we’ve sort of got an almost zero internal email policy. And a lot of the reason for that was because like you say, there was communications happening in email that weren’t happening anywhere else and should. So you know, I’m a big fan of handover file notes, you know, things that just like if there’s a thought process and advisors head they went through, and it’s the reason for what they just did fall note that, you know, for yourself, because we do jump in and out of things, don’t we? It’s not like, Well, I mean, there might be some people out there that can operate that way. But I just find you never necessarily get to complete a thought. And, you know, all of the work and all of the things for that and move on to the next one, often you’re jumping in and out of things, the phone will ring, you know, something will happen, you’ve got a meeting. So if you can get into the habit of just internally, you know, almost a note to yourself in the system, right? I assess this. And we’re and I want to make sure I check that that that next time I do. You know, next time I get onto this fall, then it just makes it so quick for you to pick it up again.

Patrick Flynn
It was funny, I had a experience with one of my clients where we tend to work as an extension of their operations team. And one downside that seemed to come with that after a little while of working together was I was getting CCD on just about everything. Yeah, I know. Right. And, and it wasn’t so much the impact on me that bothered me it was the impact on each other where I was just thinking, I know what everybody’s functions are, I know this place well enough. There’s no reason for everybody to be involved in this. And you could use a team’s or some or a slack to actually have some of the conversations publicly and people can opt in to engage. As opposed to I get a I get an interruption. I need to see if it’s relevant to me. Once I’ve assessed it, I need to deal with it. Be it respond or be it just aren’t. Yeah, but I said to them every, every time you do this, and you send it to somebody doesn’t need to know, at least $5 worth of interruption. Yeah. So yeah, think of it is if you had a swear jar. And you just cost the business 15 bucks and productivity by saying three people that didn’t need to knock. You do that a lot. And it was sudden, half of someone’s day is just dealing with interruptions that break their flow, and mean that you’re reducing productivity, and just literally just reducing the CC’s in that case, was the win. Correct? don’t need any new tech.

Peita Diamantidis
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And that’s what what we found fascinating. With slack for us. And it this is not for everybody, I mean, teams can be a similar tool, and you probably already have it, you may just not be using it, you know, a lot of people, that’s the case. But, like you say, having topics that people can decide when they jump in or out, that’s actually quite powerful. until you experience it, you might sort of not see why. But it can be really powerful. So that for example, if I’m traveling, and I’m on the road, then there’s only certain channels I’ll even look at, because the rest can wait. You know, whereas if I was if all of that was in email, I would have to wade through them. Now I’d be sitting at the board wading through 400 emails, whereas I can just jump in address the thing I need to address and jump out, because it’s far topics. Now the other thing that’s ended up happening, which is interesting for us is we’ve got workflows now in Slack that help people like answer certain questions for team members in a structured way. Or, like all these sort of things, you can click get clever. And also, audio messages are Team Love that instead of type type, type, type, type, type, type type, you know, they just send a little video or audio message to a team member. And it just breaks through, you know, screenshare and I’m trying to do this man, can you help me yum. Last time, you told me the whole you know, like, we talk about doing that stuff for clients, but you can do it for your teammates too. So we can really make a difference. And as a virtual practice, which we are it makes that connection more personal to you know, so it’s, it’s quite powerful. Now, that’s sort of and we’ve only touched on a few things that folks but it’s like automation and efficiency process. Let’s shift now to fantabulous customer experiences right and and designing those I mean, I use the word design. It’s only been a little while since we’ve sort of thought that way and advice, isn’t it where we thought, okay, we need to actually design what a client goes through as opposed to oh, here’s the advice process. We’ve been told this by ASIC. Let’s do it that way. But what are you seeing? You know, I mean, you guys build web. Let’s start right at the first point, you guys build websites for advanced practices? What are people doing as that first engagement? How are they taking people on a journey from that first moment where somebody interacts with a business,

Patrick Flynn
or one thing, we’ve definitely seen a shift in over more pronounced in the last 18 months. But goes back further than that is a shift to not just including a little bit of automation here and there, but really deepening that engagement before they come and see you. Again, and we’ve been getting feedback that a number of our website, clients are just very busy for a new business perspective. So one of our clients is in the process of putting their fees on their website, straight up full transparency. And that’ll effectively act as a filter. If you’re not interested in paying that fee. It’s not like we hid it from you, and you won’t make the call. We’ve had a client in the past who’s had a filter on their website to say apply to become a client. And indeed, we use that process effectively, ourselves. When you request a virtual coffee with me on the website, we ask a couple of questions. And you would effectively self filter your self out in that process, if if you had perhaps a different understanding of how much work was involved in the sort of support we provide. So there’s a lot you can do there to use those tools, not really as marketing to get more in, but to use them as that first point of contact in your client journey and effectively be a filter, not just a sales device. Interesting that increases your conversions for those that do come through saves your time spent on non ideal clients. And you can even go deeper with that with things like lead magnets and education. So one of our clients does passive investment, for the most part, not exclusively, but for the most part. So when they talk through their education material in their lead magnet, it’s very clear that they’re not stock stock pickers. They don’t think they’re the smartest guys in the room. And that’s abundantly clear. So if you thought that that was what you were going to get from your financial advisor, you’d probably disengage at that point. And you probably go and see somebody else. Yeah. And that sort of thinking, and that sort of approach wasn’t something that we were seeing so much to two or three years ago, it was really, we need some brochure where get us some brochure where we just need to validate that we exist and that we’re professionals. And now your website doesn’t need to just exist, it also needs to look current, it also needs to look sharp, it needs to have something that’s, that’s dated, so that people can tell that you’re actually alive. It needs to have things like Google reviews and stuff like that all stuff to build trust, so that the next step is easier, rather than just trying to get them to the next step. It’s, you know, how do we prepare people for the next step, which is a very different mindset.

Peita Diamantidis
It is, and it’s some, I mean, what I’m loving, you know, I do a lot of this, and I checked a lot of advices. And, and I always sort of check out their website and take a look. And it’s one thing I know what, you know, we’re behind, we’re behind where I want to be, but I’m loving how many, you know, I’ve got a suite of ebooks or, you know, have a YouTube series that they’ve developed that can answer questions and, like, you know, they really cottoned on to the fact that you know, where you can you can take people down a journey you can you can help them get started, you can answer some questions you could, like, there’s so much value we can give that I think we used to think was what people should pay for, instead of making them the perfect client who are ready to pay, you know, which is what ebooks and all that stuff does, right? It just really conditions them and helps them self selected saving them time to there’s nothing worse than engaging with a specialist in anything, and then working out it’s going to cost you 100 grand, if we’re ready to pay 10 Like, nothing worse, right? So it’s respecting the consumers time. And you know, helping them work out if there’s a good fit. So I love that stuff. What else are you seeing, you know, through the experience or even in ongoing, you know, retention engagement? Are there some interesting stuff you’re seeing there that people are starting to add into what they provide?

Patrick Flynn
So there’s definitely an increasing call for some interactive tools to use in meetings. Okay, interesting. So that that turn depends on the type of advisor and their approach and their style. I’m definitely seeing that increasingly so with the more technical advisors who know that number of dollars of value that they can add in They really want to demonstrate that early. And so they’re looking for more engagement type tools. And naturally, that’s a newer style of advisor, as opposed to the older school approach that will focus more on rapport, rather than demonstration of value. So that’s that’s a, I think, a generational shift, that we see that. And there are increasingly some cool tools out there that allow you to engage and allow you to demonstrate some value in those meetings. I’m not saying one approach is necessarily better than the other. But it’s definitely a trend. And then the one thing will be it’s, it’s definitely a hot topic is around the data collection phase. Yeah. Okay. And that’s, that’s a challenging one, because it really ties into that.

Peita Diamantidis
That’s getting into the tension thing of efficiency versus experience. Yeah, and in fact, let’s hold that one, because I think we can dive into that as the first example of where, where it can go wrong. Because I think the other thing I did want to touch on isn’t what I’m seeing on the experience sort of side is, you know, client webinars like doing a whole lot more one to many sort of content and letting people dive into that it happened during COVID. But a lot of us are holding on to that still. And clients are really loving it. And in fact, in our practice, we use it as a test balloon for things. So we’re thinking about doing this, we’ll flag it in the webinar and see how they react, you know, so it’s a really great way to sort of test concepts out which I like, I’m seeing people doing seminars, again, like I’m starting to see people sort of do that in person events to so the whole connecting one to many even, you know, online challenges in getting people to take action, and you know, that sort of stuff. So I think there’s some creativity happening. Now that we’ve sort of gone through some pretty significant shifts in the way we’ve got to do things. So it’s sort of exciting in that sense. But let’s dive into this example. I love I

Patrick Flynn
gotta jump in one. Quick one there. There is an element of everything old is new again. Yes. And one trend, if we sort of dial back 10 years, and if I look at a presentation I would have presented 10 years ago, it would have been people can Google everything. And after they Google they have a pretty high confidence that it’s right. Yeah. And one trend that sort of happened over the last 10 years. This is not my term, I heard it from somebody else, and I loved it is the certification of the internet. I thought you’d like it. And that is you got eloquent, it’s so eloquent. But you know what, it actually captures it right? You got to Google, you used to not have three ads at the top that you had to work past, you go straight to the results. They used to be less keyword heavy content that was really just built around SEO, and it was really just a competition for SEO as opposed to genuine authority. So you’d be more likely to get the right answer at the top of the first page without having to fight the system and go around through what it’s trying to give you. Actually a better effectiveness 10 years ago. Now, there’s other things that have gotten better, but you used to be able to get to the right answer quicker. Now, you’ll get 10 different opinions, you know, you’re more likely to get 10 different opinions, and it’ll be harder to get to them. And in that battle for SEO That gets out on top. And as a result, people get less trust with that self sourced information. And so the value that you can bring by demonstrating that you’re there in person, or building rapport over a webinar has, has more value than it’s had for a long time, which I think is exciting, because it opens up a lot of opportunities for advice,

Peita Diamantidis
and the audio, whether it’s video or audio, but then hearing you speak. I can’t tell you how powerful that is. And it’s not until you expect like you do a lot of it and experience it. So now that when this episode, I think it’s number 50 of the advice tech, ensemble advice tech podcast, I get advisors or support staff, all sorts of people, people even in BDMS and others that I’ve never met, come running up to me at industry. I have never met this human being before. But they’re excited to see me they want to talk to me they want to engage, it’s all positive, it’s got a great vibe. That only happens that wouldn’t happen if I was blogging you know, it’s a different communication that that in their ear or video or like you say live, it’s just it’s a connection that gets deeper a lot faster. You can still do it with blogs, of course you can but but there’s just a difference. You know, and I and the people that that take advantage of that for, you know, future clients and engaging that way I think probably find that their onboarding is a lot smoother, you know, because somebody’s already bought in. They’ve listened to you. They’ve heard you they see me like it’s it’s so powerful. It’s something that I’d even underrated how powerful it was.

Patrick Flynn
I know one firm they we did their website, we’ve integrated the podcast. into their website. And their average meetings went from roughly a new business meetings when roughly from 2.5, down to 1.5. Because the clients come in and they already trust the person at the other end. Yeah, really, it’s a question of how do your How does your work apply to me, as opposed to convince me that you’re where I should invest through or at least,

Peita Diamantidis
like, those are big differences in terms of time, like cost for delivering service? Like, it’s massive, you know, so yeah, it’s powerful. Now, let’s get into this. The the old collecting data, the old fact vine, it’s something that so we all get why we all get why we’re trying to use tech for that, or we’re trying to automate it, or what now that the challenge, I’m gonna I’m gonna confess up front, folks, the challenge I have with some of this stuff is, it turns it can turn into outsourcing to our clients. Like, wow, that’s shitty and difficult, we’ll get the client to do that. So they spent all this time filling in information and loading stuff up. And I’m sure you’ve seen that too, where it’s just, they’ve, yes, they’ve applied tech. Yes, they’ve updated their process. Yes, it looks efficient from the advisors end. But actually it just shitty from the clients end. And it’s a perfect example of that tension between efficiency and client experience. Have you seen that in play?

Patrick Flynn
Yes, definitely. So I once did the big factfinder review project. And in doing so I got some family members to complete a fact find, and I just said, I’m just a fly on the wall. I just want to watch you complete it. At the 45 Minute, Mark, I had to exit because they were starting to dispute. The one partner was saying, How come you still haven’t chased up your old employer about your super I bought you said this was sorted. And they were literally having a domestic and I just had an exit?

Peita Diamantidis
Sorry, gotta go. Yeah. It’s like,

Patrick Flynn
I think I have all the feedback I need about this process

Peita Diamantidis
has been very useful. Thank you. Yes.

Patrick Flynn
So that taught me both entry. Well, right, that’s telling ya 100%. And, you know, the, it, it’s frustrating for everybody naturally, because you just see the double entry. And for some fields, naturally, an emails an email, or phone numbers or phone number or home addresses a home address, then you’ve got the more complicated ones around things like budgets, and you know, where there’s an emotional context to a budget. There’s an emotional context, two clients don’t know what their budget is. They don’t know what they spend. Right. So to put that in a form to say, you know, I don’t really know. And I’m confronted to even think about it is a challenging experience. There’s, I don’t know where my super is. And then there’s also advices fact phones out there that will ask questions that we don’t even want clients to answer. Because we wouldn’t accept their answer anyways. Yeah. So I’ll never have a tool to go any deeper on Super, rather than roughly how much and where do I send the 33rd? Party authority? Right? Why would I ask them for anything else? Yeah, if compliance came around and took a look at it, they’d go, you just accepted what the client said, I’m sorry, Mr. Advisor, that’s not good enough.

Peita Diamantidis
Well, then they just so bad at it. Like if they guess that stuff this wrong, that over and under, like, it’s an it’s natural. We don’t think about that stuff all the time. You know, it’s natural that it’s like that. And I was, I was, I think it was listening to a podcast, actually. And it wasn’t about advice. But it was a similar client experience where you had to collect a lot of information. And and the gentleman that was listening to me this good point is like, just because you can collect it all all at once doesn’t mean you should. And I think we get all but it’s all the data. Look, we’ve put it all in 140 page form. Aren’t we clever? Like, it’s potentially the dumbest thing we can do? Like it’s potentially the worst way, from an experience perspective. And to your point. I mean, I think I could have an advice called like an intro conversate conversation with a potential new client without knowing any numbers yet. Like, what brought you here? What was the trigger? What was the thing that made you think I really need to make an appointment? Like what there’s so many things that are the human elements that will then also help build trust such that they’re okay, I will answer that or I’ll provide you that or the third party authority eat it, like it’s, there’s so much you can cover in a conversation without just making them completely financially naked. And filling in this fact find, you know, so it’s, it’s, um, it’s an interesting thing to sort of map out over time of that first encounter with clients or those you know, the maybe an onboarding experience or First advice, and think about, what could we delay collecting that? Like, when could we do that? Could that be laid out? Could we get it a different way? Could we, you know, it’s an interesting sort of exercise to run through to get a bit creative on that. And clients will thank you for it. I think

Patrick Flynn
that ties into a concept I refer to as the trust Kenyan, where you have a Kenyan, if you graphed out how much effort you ask a client to put in and how much value you deliver, and the time delay between those things. So there’s typically a time delay between when we ask clients to do stuff, and when we deliver some actual value for the off the back of that. So if we don’t need their ID, until quite late in the process, when we’ll have, you know, hopefully delivered some value to them so far, then it’s better to defer those sorts of questions. And if we can bring forward any value, then that’s great, too. And just close that gap. Because the reason why I call it the trust game counting is the gap is dependent on trust, you use your trust credit, to say, put in all of this effort, it’s going to take 45 minutes, and maybe you’ll have a domestic with your partner along the way, but put in all this effort, meet with me, trust me part with all this information, get financially naked. And don’t worry in three to four weeks, I’ll deliver a recommendation to you not an implemented outcome, but a recommendation to you in that timeframe. And that requires trust that you’re going to do all of that now you can in the same timeframe, you could have probably bought a house, you could have gotten married, you could have taken out a loan for a million bucks, but you can’t get advice on 100,000 in that timeframe. So you know, there’s a lot of trust in 2023 that that requires, and bundling a whole bunch of things into one point is a concern. Unless that really is what your client processes about. If you really want if your advice vision is I want to be the most accessible advisor 100% It’s going to be our we are the lowest cost advisor for what you get. But it is we do ask you to do proper homework, or come up with some innovative ways to do it. To get them there such as we’ll have a six part workshop series, you’re effectively doing your own cash flow advice through there. You’re doing your education through there. And then by the end of that, were you the clients ready to hand over all their data or they’ve used at all? That means that you can just walk straight

Peita Diamantidis
to one place or it’s Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And it’s certainly one of the things I’ve tried out, that was an interesting thing. Were summarizing back to them their situation. So not advice. It’s literally almost a an engaging and interesting fact find, you know, like, but it’s summarizing that back actually had value. Like that was something that they were like, well that we would have paid for that, you know, and it’s like, okay, well hold on, as part of this bouncy ball process, we can insert these things that seem to us, like it’s not advice, but they really like, Oh, that was great. We’d never got that picture before, you know, never got that insight. So I do think, you know, we got to put ourselves in their shoes. I mean, I see this stuff all over the place. And one of the things I’m starting to notice actually is where automation or tech or efficiency has been focused on and people the business or the government department, whatever it is, hasn’t thought about what happens when it works well. So when it attracts loads of people, right? So they go on, and this works really well. So the Opal Card here in Sydney. So that’s what we tap on an off public transport now, right. And I live quite close to the light rail, which is so convenient and easy. And we love it a lot. And you can just tap on and off. I mean, it’s just there’s no waiting in line and I’m going to buy a ticket and you missed the train. Now that’s rubbish. It’s awesome. Except when everybody in Leichardt is getting on the same light rail and off and you’re trying to get off and tap to let them know that you’ve got off the light rail and you’re all standing around one little poles skinny pole, with a little dial like the size, you know of a coaster. And we’re all trying to tap off and it takes like 15 minutes for you to leave the light rail station. I’m like, Guys, you got so you made the experience so wonderful on a one person experience you didn’t think about what would happen when you get inundated. Right? You just didn’t think it through Taylor Swift tickets, right? Ticket tech or whoever that was didn’t think about well, it when you know, with these type of concepts when it goes nuts, do we need a ballot system? Do we need it? Like is there something else we’ve got to add to this so that the entire country of parents aren’t off work to sit with multiple devices trying to buy tickets for their kids, you know, so it’s, there’s some interesting examples I think we probably all need to watch. Even maybe for the practices that are getting busy like this, these challenges they’re facing with a lot of interest. What’s going to happen if you suddenly get away with 30 people that log into that thing, right or, or try to book appointments have you considered putting content friction on how quickly they can book them or like all sorts of things like think through what if it works? Which often we don’t write, we just think through one.

Patrick Flynn
Yeah, I think in terms of the, in terms of how that works for an advice, onboarding experience, and especially when you’re thinking about it from I just want to automate some stuff. Yes, really. It all these things sound better in theory than they do in practice, which ties to what you’re saying. So if it’s a case of, you know, what, how much data would a client put in a fact find, they would just take in data rental. And some of those things might not belong in your CRM, because they’re point in time data points, like login, leave balances, some of those things might be stuff that it’s great that the clients done it, but you don’t trust what the clients don’t even have to overwrite that data because they’ve just estimated something or they don’t even understand their own finances, and you need to do the investigation. So how much time are you actually saving when you’re going, you know what I can trust that client data, Hollis bowlers. And then if we manage that, effectively, really, how much value to the business is there in terms of putting it back onto the client? Now, there might be very little value from a data entry standpoint, especially if you’ve got a bit of offshoring in your mix, you know, reducing that cost of data entry even further still, the value to the business might be relatively low. Now, there’s something to be said for giving the advisor more information going into an appointment. Right? And that’s where we, we generally take an approach of choice being an efficient option, but not mandated work. Yeah. So I’m an introvert. And I want my meeting to be as short as possible. And I will spend the time to pre fill anything, so that I have so that I don’t have to talk to a human any more than I need to. Now, not everybody’s like, man,

Peita Diamantidis
no, no, but it is an interesting, people look at outsourcing and automation. And probably underwrite, sometimes you can just throw bodies at it, you know, like sometimes, and we’ve had this with like data, tidying up data, because it’s just not quite right. And it’s like offshoring with some resources, and just throw some bodies at it, it seems like it’s this big thing. And it is, but getting it right. And once it’s tidy, it’s like it was worth manually doing that. That was that was valuable, I would have had to spend a lot of money and time trying to get something that would tidy up data, in a, you know, in a machine or a system sometimes just get a body to do this, you know, just make it a less expensive body.

Patrick Flynn
Yeah, that’s all right. So we’re gonna look at, you know, what, really is the value for doing this? What is the best way to do it? Yes, it might be worthwhile, or it might seem like a really good idea to do it this way. But yes, you could just throw a body at it. When, especially when you’ve got offshore as an option. If you’ve got a little bit of offshore already, it’s naturally a lot easier to scale that up. Rather than starting from scratch,

Peita Diamantidis
from scratch, for sure, for sure. Let’s talk through some some and I just came up with some areas, and some of them are not going to be popular in the advice space yet, or maybe ever, but I thought it was an interesting debate for us to have. There are things that can add value, both on efficiency and from experience, but could potentially go wrong. And I’m just curious on how each of our views of these and you know whether ultimately at the end of it you like each one of them, Hey, are we giving it a thumbs up? Or we’re like, maybe not, maybe this is a bad idea. The first one was, you know, really empowering consumers? Are your future customers with self service resources. So their online resources, they might even be chatbots? What’s your take on that sort of that sort of tech?

Patrick Flynn
So building a little bit on what I was saying that I love choice where people have choice. And my focus is generally on keeping it really simple and really easy to use. chatbots specifically, have some unique contexts in advice. We don’t typically have a lot of stuff that a chatbot would be able to really help with. It’s not like an A and Zed chatbot that could say, hey, what do I need to open up a deposit account? Oh, well, he’s the three steps that you have to do happy to help you. We don’t have those sorts of things. There might be a narrow range of things that we could have for a chatbot to intelligently auto respond to. And then if we start getting into you know what a chant GPT for enabled chatbot might be able to achieve in advice. We’ve naturally got those regulations where we need to know what that thing is saying. So if it adds a very significant risk there that will likely be unpalatable. So I would have to give it a thumbs down right now.

Peita Diamantidis
Good luck good for May I think the power of this type of tool is what you’ve got behind it. So if you’ve got an explanatory video on how to fill in that nominated beneficiary form or like, so those, when people get stuff sent to them, and there’s like, bugger, I can’t quite work this out, then I could see a chatbot might be and they’re doing it at 11pm, which is not out of the realm of possibility, then I could see a chatbot being powerful if you have the thing that walks them through the thing they’re trying to do behind it. And I think that’s the issue is, we see often chat bots that are just those one line answers. And I agree with you, I don’t think we have that stuff very much in advice. But I do think I think on the admin side, there could be some creative use for it. It may not be a public chat bot as much as maybe in your client portal, for example. So it might be sort of living in there. But I think, but you’d have to have built, you’d have to have known what your frequently asked questions are, what are the things that the team always have to walk people through? Or what you know, that sort of stuff? And you could build those answers first, and then use something like that, that could just out of hours? Sort of answers? Potentially,

Patrick Flynn
there’s some intelligent knowledge based tools that will do parts of that, yeah, if you’ve got a good knowledge base, you’ve built some mostly evergreen content in there, it can become a really valuable resource for when clients engage. And then you ask clients to lodge their queries through there. And then it’ll say, perhaps you’re looking for these three things down the side, maybe they’re right, and the client never makes the submission, maybe they’re completely off and the clients not interfered with on their way to making that contact with you. There’s ones that can be done in a secured context, which is key, then you’re naturally sending some queries off or solving that solution, solving that problem for that client at 11. o’clock on at on a given night. Yeah, I know, for some people, they’ll actually want the phone call, though.

Peita Diamantidis
Yes. So does it depends on you on what value that has, and I’m with you, too, you’ve got to give people choice. So if they just can’t, I mean, if they’re not the type that would watch a video to solve their problem, then you always need to have the, hey, do you, you know, do you want somebody to, you know, either somebody to call you back in the morning, or even, hey, grab a time, here’s a Calendly link, get in now, you know, you’re going to get the call at that time, you know, so leading people do that out of hours, so that they’ve because they, they want to know you’re on it, and taking action. So So certainly, these things on their own I think never work. You know, it’s one of those things that I think needs to be embedded in the other the other way you interact. So yeah, I’m probably a middling like a maybe like, I think it’s a you know, proceed with caution thumb. Yeah. So maybe it’s a sideways long for me for that one. Because I think it just it needs some nuance, I think to make it work. So that the second one is live chat. So, you know, it’s business hours, and you have say, a live chat function to handle things on the website. I’m assuming your response will be similar in terms of security and concerns that that can be handled. Well. Is that Is that what you figure for that type of tool?

Patrick Flynn
Yeah, look, I think that can be handled relatively well, given the risk attached to that contact is probably relatively low. As long as it doesn’t say, especially if it doesn’t look like they’re speaking with an advisor now. And making that point clear, is the advisor who’s logged into the app, making that being the brand app as opposed to an AR? Yes. Ideally, it’s a support person whose photo is there so that they’re bonding with somebody who’s really on the other end, which is genuine and true? Yes. But there’s just there’s no, there’s no potential of confusion that they’re an AR is ideal. But I’m actually a thumbs up. Yeah. accessible. I don’t like it when they ping automatically and things like that. And they feel like they’re a little bit. You know, no one’s really there. All the time. No, no, no. Yeah. All believe it, or no one sent me a message right now when I happened to be on the website. Right. But having it there as an option, I think is totally fine. And you can get, you can get it so that you can have an app on your phone that will ping it so that if you want to have extended hours, then you can it’ll still work. I think it’s a good thing.

Peita Diamantidis
And it’s an interesting, you know, for those listeners that are dealing with high volume of queries in terms of new potential clients. You know, you could end up having using something like this, you could end up having somebody that is sitting on a tool like this and can be handling six different conversations at once. Because they’re interacting with different ones and if it’s that early stage and you want them to qualify clients or anything like that this type of tool can mean that There is a bit of conversation that can happen before it gets escalated to a call, even if it’s not with an advisor. Initially, it could be with somebody else. But I do think, yeah, there’s, we’re probably not using them enough. I reckon this is a thumbs up for me this one I know, we don’t have it yet. And I keep on thinking I actually think this could add some value I think this could could really help people get some easy answers feel engaged with, but also be easy use for the team to interact.

Patrick Flynn
I agree, I think it’s definitely at the margins. I don’t think it’s a huge win. But it does make you presenters ready and available and alive.

Peita Diamantidis
Yeah, yes. So the next one we’ve got here is, though, I’ve described it as sort of show until meaning using videos as in recorded videos and screen sharing things on videos and stuff like that, to better engage with either prospects or clients, I think, you know, there are going to be some queries that you just can’t either type, whether it’s via email, or any other type or even on the phone sort of sucks, like, oh, it’s, you know, maybe they’re trying to log in, this happens all the time with some of our clients on a particular platform, they really struggle to log into the platform, like, like, Okay, go to the right, you know, top right and click on that blue button. And then like, it’s just, it’s a disaster. So sometimes that sort of screen sharing, and being able to show them what you want them to do, you know, those sorts of things, even if it’s pre recorded can make a huge difference. Are you seeing that being used much, by advice practices,

Patrick Flynn
not nearly as much as it should be? Yeah. There’ll be a million possible hangups, that will cause advisors not to do it. But it’s definitely an easy win. So if you’ve got any way to provide a hyperlink to that content, relatively easily, something that’s not visible on your website, so that you can’t give implied advice or implied product endorsement, there are still ways that you can make that very easy to access so that anytime a client calls, and they say, Hey, I, I can’t do this, then you can just say, Great, rather than me stepping it through with you over the phone, I’m going to send you a link to a video that a do a better job than I could Anyways, if that doesn’t work, then call me. Yeah.

Peita Diamantidis
Yeah, for sure. And I think, yeah, I give this one a thumbs up too. And in fact, there are some clients that we’ve encountered some who, like watching a video while doing something, you know, on the like, that’s a bit of a challenge. And so for them, we’ve actually used tango, which you can be so you’re recording yourself, you open tango, you start doing something, and it’s taking screenshots of each step. And it’s almost creating a PDF of the steps you took. And it to me it’s like a halfway like, it’s, it’s better than you trying to type that thing. But, but it’s for people who sort of have can’t quite maybe a bit older, can’t quite handle or watch the video and like it’s all a bit too fast and difficult. And so then they’ve got the PDF, they could even print it out if they wanted to, you know, and Okay, step one, you know. So, Tango, I’ve found quite powerful for that, too. So yeah, I’m with you. This is a thumbs up. And I agree that we don’t use it enough. And we have, our teams are at support teams have repetitive conversations on this stuff, that they could just happily send somebody a link, the person might not even have to call in imagine, you know, maybe you’ve sent a pack to somebody for some things to do. And you send a follow up email with a link with instructions on this stuff, just in case you have any trouble, right, like preempt the problem. And once again, you’re adding value,

Patrick Flynn
I have a concept that I use when I come into a business that’s really backlogged, which happens all too often. You end up getting this vicious cycle of client expectations, where you’ve gotten an email, you’ve sat on it for four days. Now your response needs to be a real darn good response. Because you didn’t give them a quick response. And you’re feeling like you’re writing to the delay, as opposed to what the client probably could have gotten out of you. If you responded, same day. You could have said, quick answer is you should probably do this. But if that doesn’t work for you, just give me a call. Yeah. And the client would have been very happy because it was prompt. And it doesn’t need to be the perfect response. Because you got heaps of bonus points for a prompt response. Yes. Same goes with video if not doubly so. client sends you something through, though. Hey, I’m just going to do a quick video for you. You know, just a rough cut. I’m just going to click around on my screen. You won’t be perfect, but it should cover everything that you need. If this doesn’t solve it, let me know and I’m happy to step you through it over the phone one on one. Click, click click click click. It’s as easy as that. I know it doesn’t seem it didn’t seem that complicated. Hopefully you’ve got everything you need. Call me if you don’t. That doesn’t take long If you get a lot of points for being prompt and being thorough, and you know, the client is gonna love it, and they’re gonna feel like you cared. But if you sit on it for Oh boy, I can, you know, maybe maybe if I’m, you know, clear my Friday afternoon, I can create the perfect video to create that answer. It’s never going to happen, and then you want to report until Monday. And then you’ll be back in that vicious cycle. So I would be have the have a basic setup, you don’t need the world’s best mic, you don’t need this camera, probably what comes through with your laptop will do. And just do it quickly, as if they were in the office and you were showing them at your screen in the office. It doesn’t need to be any sharper than that. Do it quickly, and they’ll love it. And if you’ve got a really good process going down the track, maybe you can say, hey, I’ve got these 30 videos that I’ve just done as quick videos, quick wins for people, can you just recreate what I’ve done, but put all the polish on it and stuff like that? Do that as an ongoing project? Take your time. And you’ve done your training video in the scoping video at the same time as solving a client need on the day?

Peita Diamantidis
Yes, yes, absolutely. And it’s some annual of bringing, practicing the video thing, you’re just doing it more. And it’s it’s such a good solution. But people you write to avoid it. And it’s it’s really unnecessary. It’s so powerful. And it’s no different to you talking to them in a meeting. Like it’s, it’s no different. So, relax, just talk like you would and if you mess up the thing, God, that’s not where I’m at to click, click to the next thing. Like it’s just, you know, get some get relaxed and just get them done. And like you say, you’ll start to collect them and realize you’ve done 30 In the last month that that one thing, ooh, maybe we should do it better. It’s a great way to narrow down which ones you should, you should like you say tidy up. So I’m with you, I think this is a big thumbs up. It’s one, we could probably do lots more of it. Now the next one is something that look at comes up a lot in innovation events, you know, and there’s these conferences, and you get very smart people talking about all the things we should be doing. And we need a holistic Data View. And it’s all about the data and, and you know, having that and they’re right, so So I’m not suggesting they’re wrong. But I think what we probably don’t ever talk about is why this is important. And one of the things for me, that this can add real value is I don’t think many of us notice how long we spend trying to find stuff. So you’ll start on a Cline and you’re trying to dig out that information. And it’s not in that thing, it’s in this other thing, and then like that, searching and gathering, I call it can take up huge amounts, like the step sites upward from 15% of everybody’s day, it can be as high as a third of just searching and gathering. And so that means you’re not interacting with the client, you know, so that’s going to be a drop in customer experience. So, you know, it’s not just inefficient, it’s really sort of bad for experience, you know. So I’m curious your take on the things we can do to sort of bring, and it’s not just data, it’s context of that client. It’s personalization, like all the ways we can sort of use all the different views we have in a client and get access to it easily. So that we can just make that sort of process and experience better.

Patrick Flynn
That is a complicated one. The law, I completely agree. One of the things that we do when we start with a businesses will survey their users, and we’ll ask them a better dozen tricky questions of where would you go to find this? And we’ll see how consistent those answers are. And then we’ll also ask how successful would you typically be when you do try that thing. And if there’s anything where we’re getting, you know, anything under 80% for, you know, 80% of difference across the team, and they’re successful, less than 80% of the time, it’s a pretty big red flag that we don’t have clarity over our structure. And that really is the first thing of just everybody should know, this is how we do it. This is where we say that this is what we’re expecting to see there, etc. And that that flags that really quickly. The some of that stuff about keeping that up to date, can be very technology dependent to see that you’ve got to keep them fresh. We typically build automated checks at the pre review, post implement and post implementation stages. And we’ll also typically build tools that will monitor a database on an ongoing manner. So that if there’s data Miss entry on a Monday, somebody’s going to find out about it on the Tuesday. Yeah, that that stuff is kept fresh. Will we’ve got a few dozen rule sets where it’ll go you know, this when this data point and that data point, say different things. That can’t be right. It doesn’t make any sense flagging. And the other sorts of things that really do feel like quite a lot of investment in this because they are because keeping data up to date, continuously is hard. But the flip side is, like you said that 15% A day of just everything’s where it’s meant to be. And I run a report, and the data is accurate, really is hard to understate how valuable that is to be able to have a client phone call, you pull up a file, and you trust what’s there. While they’re on the phone, that’s huge. But yet, it will there There isn’t. There isn’t an easy win to that. One of the things that we’ll often talk about in terms of that is happening, an 18 month view on that sort of stuff yet where you can build some of the tools that I mentioned. And that can be really good places to start. But really, if you’re thinking about, hey, I’m doing review prep, how do I need to do this right? This year, so that this will be easier next year. If you do that, right, and you’ve got good systems and tech, that might be time neutral this year, you’re just doing it the smart way. Or it might be 5% more time this year. But it’s going to be allocated percent less time next year. And you know, if you can spare that little 5%, or we can find some other efficiencies to give you that 5% Somehow, worst case, throw our body at it, like you said, although that’s genuinely worst case, then having that 18 month view is vital to be able to get that stuff, right. And, and it is an investment. It’s true.

Peita Diamantidis
And it’s it’s it is an interesting point, because there are a number of things that whether it’s real legislative requirements that change or you know, like remembering, you know, when we were first doing FDS is all these sort of things. Whenever we approach those things, one of the questions I always sort of asked myself in the team is, do we need to do this as one whole database hit? Or are we spreading it over 12 months, you know, everybody gets interacted with over the 12 months. So we could we just schedule it that way. So that we know at the end, we’ll have done everybody like is that going to work. And sometimes that’s just less of an impulse, and in fact gives you an opportunity to throw a few extra things to check in as part of that process. And it just doesn’t shut the whole practice down. You know, so we’ve certainly approached that. The other thing, I’d say that, and this won’t work for everybody, but it did significantly transform the way the team could fight. So this is documents. So this is document storage. So historically, so for those of us who haven’t used online storage, or old enough to remember, you know, servers and things like that, then you know, the whole sub folder game was quite intense. So, you know, and there’s the top hierarchy and then the sub folder and the sub folder, you could end up going through these threads of like 26 sub folders, right, and the poor new person who had no earthly clue where to find things, and needed to know all the secrets, right. And so one of the good things is now searching for stuff is a lot easier, because you can literally sort of type in what you’re looking for. And generally your your tool, whether it’s Microsoft, or Google Drive, or whatever dropped with whatever you’re using, generally will make that easier for you. But the thing we realized was, when we’re looking for things in, you know that CLIENTS folder folder for whatever expression, generally, it’s event specific. So it’s the most recent review, or it’s the most recent query, or it’s the, so we now if you open the CLIENTS folder, there, actually, you know, date audit event folders, and then under that event is everything. So even the advisors things versus the admins, they’re all under the event. And we just found that meant handover amongst the team was so much cleaner, because it was just in the one spot. There wasn’t the I’ve got to go up there. And you’ll fill it up and then down here, and well, where do the advisors put it again? I don’t know, where do they put their thing, you know, like, it just changed that our place and their place that can happen in teams. And so that it matches our CRM too. So a CRM looks at things that way it looks at events, and then notes and things sit under Events. And so we just, we just found that was a massive shift that just saved everybody sanity.

Patrick Flynn
And then it’s funny, building back to that automation topic. If you’re saving, you spend 15% of your day looking for stuff, you can reduce that down to 5% of your day looking for stuff. That’s 10% saving of the whole team per day. That’s everybody per day. That’s way more than you’re going to get out of connecting a tool a tool B.

Peita Diamantidis
I agree. I agree. We try get really fancy. It’s like you don’t need to do some of this other stuff. And you’ll have like, massive wins, you know,

Patrick Flynn
yeah, that’s properly phase three. Your Phase One has so much work to get done before then.

Peita Diamantidis
Yes. Yes, yes, yes, I think we’re a big thumbs up for both of us for that. Now, this last one before we sort of wrap up. This is interesting. So customer feedback. Now, I know there’s a lot of people probably now focusing a lot on testimonials. So that’s certainly something and I know you’ve written articles and Google reviews and things like that. But there’s another layer of that that’s sort of asking continually through the process, what’s working or what’s not? What’s your take on what’s happening at the moment with that, and the opportunity to sort of be getting insight into how it feels for the consumer and potentially improving that experience?

Patrick Flynn
Well, for starters, the to cover to the Google review, sort of take it one small step before that. You can only ask a client for feedback, once really, you can’t say, great, I’d like a written testimonial, I’m gonna film you as well. And can you also leave a Google review and go to advisor ratings as well.

Peita Diamantidis
And the customer will be like, I won’t do any of those things.

Patrick Flynn
Exactly. So you can only ask for one thing at one time. The for most businesses, I would be prioritizing Google reviews, because that’s the one that’s going to pay the biggest dividend back to you. I have one, one website advice website I came across, I’ve tried to reach out to them, they haven’t responded. They have to Google reviews. They’ve clearly never set themselves up for Google reviews. One person just proactively reviewed them as five stars with no comment. And one person reviewed them as one star with a scathing, scathing indictment of the business. They probably just saying, Yeah, you know what the new business is really tough these days, I don’t know what’s going on. Because they just weren’t check. And to insure yourself against that, if you’ve got 20 positives, because you’ve tried to engage clients for Google reviews, then you can’t have that because they’ll just be a lone voice in the crowd. And they’ll actually increase the trust in your review, rather than decreasing it. So I always want to stop there. If you get that through your website, it’s got the little profile pics, it’s got their names, and it’s trusted. So if SEO aside, and the SEO is great, too. But that’s, since you can only ask for one thing at a time, really, I would start with that. And I would run that program for all new business clients ongoing. And I would run that for your review clients, your ongoing client, so your periodic clients for 12 months until you’ve asked them once a year. Once you’ve finished a program, where you’ve pretty much asked everybody to leave a Google review, whether they’ve left one or not, you’ve asked them at least once, then you get to your next year program where you might get a call at the end of review, we’re just going to give them an opportunity to give us really short and sharp bits of feedback, just on how we’re going right now. And then that can just be a simple hyperlink to a form that’s hosted on your website, and shouldn’t take them longer than a couple of minutes to complete. And you do that at the end of your review process. So it’s live, it’s not an annual survey, I don’t mind an annual survey. But if you can get that live survey, you’re going to get better quality feedback from people. And they’re more likely to complete that feedback because they’ve just finished working with you on something. So your response rates will be more than double easily. So that’s sort of the way I approach that problem as sort of an 18 month, again, sort of program of get through this, then flip it to non Google review type process. Yep. And that can be really cool. The little things like at the end of each response, where you can give a thumbs up or a thumbs down or something you’ve had this go. I think that’s great in a call center context, or if you work in a really high volume context, I don’t really like it for advice, relationships, I feel it makes it feel more transactional than it ought to be. But that is just my opinion, when it comes to that. There. There will be a little bit of horses for courses for that one, but absolutely everybody should be capturing Google reviews, and should be getting that live review after review once they’ve had their crack at Google.

Peita Diamantidis
Yeah, I think and so I completely agree we and we haven’t yet got that sorted it’s something that’s on our project list for our brainstorm we’re having a couple of weeks just to make it part of the process and make it easy for us to remember to request it you know, and so because like you say we’re only cycle of seeing people on the shuttle reviews one that Well Hello, are you just making fun of that. But one of the things that I noticed is you know, feedback can form well can perform a number of functions it can literally give you insight, which is great. But it can also remind them of why they liked it so we found that with our webinars so at the end now we have a little poll that pops up and hey, you know what did you like or dislike when we’re How did you write it? You know, and and We found that when we did that, the then follow up emails we were getting us getting thinking as for the, during the webinar increased, and it’s just interesting. It’s reminding people how they felt about it. Like, did you finally see Oh, I did? Oh, well, I should tell you then, you know, like, it’s so interesting that it’s just about prompting people to self evaluate, you know, and just sort of look at Oh, yeah, and actually, that was really good. I think also, and I’m planning to do this without, even with the Google reviews, this is give people some sample questions, like, if you’re not sure what you want to say, just answer this question. You know, and sort of giving them a way to make it easier, because it is, it’s, it’s a bit awkward, you know, well, they’re really good. And I love them a lot. You know, like, it’s not particularly helpful, either. I mean, I use testimonials or reviews of restaurants almost exclusively, like, there’s very few places, I’ll go without checking that sort of thing. And I’m not interested in the, it’s the best place ever, you know, I’m interested in the we had this and Oh, my goodness, it blew my mind because of all of and, you know, you know, Craig servitors. And cheese, he was nice. And like, I want that, you know, I want to understand the experience. And so I think sometimes the way you position those things is important to to help them remember, or to draw out what they really you know, enjoyed about it, not just the fact that they enjoyed it.

Patrick Flynn
We like to that point, we like to give them a backdoor as when we build our standard process. So it will be please click here, it’s we have a little button, go click. But if you’d prefer to provide more detailed feedback or feedback that includes your personal financial details, then please click here to provide a private private feedback, something to that effect. And then that’ll again, go to a survey that’s on the website, if they don’t have a Google account that gives them an outlet to provide the positive feedback. Or if they want to say actually, I really wasn’t happy, I don’t think my this account was handled that well, then they can do that. Get that private, they’ve got a avenue for that personal financial details to want to save space.

Peita Diamantidis
Yeah. Because I mean, the The Absolute Truth is you can’t fix something you don’t know about. So we’ve got to be asking this stuff.

Patrick Flynn
And double down on what’s rocking that you don’t know. Yes,

Peita Diamantidis
yes. I completely agree. like nobody’s listening to those webinars, they don’t like them. Now. They They really do. So we should keep doing those I completely agree, or something

Patrick Flynn
small that you didn’t realize was making an impact,

Peita Diamantidis
and potentially a big impact. I know

Patrick Flynn
one practice that would bake, bake muffins. And, you know, if that’s where their feedbacks coming through, and people saying, you know, boy, we love walking into the smell of warm muffins. You know, you might have thought it was a bit of a gimmick, you might have thought it was a bit nice. But if you get that feedback coming through, then it might be even more powerful than you thought. Or it might be the opposite.

Peita Diamantidis
Yes, yes. And look, there’s nothing wrong with a gimmick, if it works. 100%. You know, like, you know, what, whatever, we can

Patrick Flynn
get all the flips and dispensers and things, right? It doesn’t evil?

Peita Diamantidis
No, no, but it’s absolutely I completely agree with you. Well, look, we’ve covered loads in this conversation. And thank you for sticking with us listeners, it’s been a bit of a longer one. But I think, you know, we’ve sort of really, I really wanted to dive in these concepts as opposed to just the tech to solve them. Because I think, actually, the concepts are the harder part, this this tension. And so is there anything we sort of missed, or you want to leave everybody with as a thought to get them diving down that sort of rabbit hole?

Patrick Flynn
Well, I suppose the when I think about automation, in particular, when I’m sort of thinking about anything that I can do that will make things more effective without having a human do the job. The there’s a lot it is a really is a big deep dive. If you get the some of those concepts of really thinking about well, how much time are we saving, and thinking about data security as you’re going because in every time you introduce a new tool, you also introduce a new point of risk. What how does this impact the client experience? Are we trying to solve our problems with this? Are we trying to solve the client’s problems with this? They’re all real things that you should be deeply considering not just at a surface level, but really thinking about before you pursue a particular type of automation, and I love automation. But they’re really primary principles First, you start with that client experience first, and then go great. Now let’s take a look at all the things that we can do from there. And there are some shortcuts you can do some things where you know what, you might not need tech, you just make stuff look prettier and sharper. And actually think about the words that you’re saying a bit more than you have. Yep, that’s effectively automation doesn’t add any more time. But you get a better outcome. It can be it can be simple as you know what we’ll give clients choice to self serve, but never force it upon them. So you know, we, we still call to book an appointment, perhaps but when they we don’t get through, then we send them the scheduling link as an option callback, and we’ll book it or use this link. And they’ve got the choice, now you tried them the maximum friendliness option, but it just didn’t work. So you give him a chance, at all, rather choice. So there’s lots of things that you can do there that don’t necessarily have to impact client experience. And I’m be very loath to impact client experience with automation. And the end, you really have to test those things out, you really got to test them deeply, not you’re doing it, but live cases with real people. So you know, get the equivalent of your brother and sister in law. And, you know, see if that ends up being a domestic at the end, you know, see, see how they find it with their level of financial education, their complete lack of context to the view would have the tech savviness, because maybe they don’t work in front of a computer all day, every day, maybe don’t have a pre existing Google account and Microsoft account or whatever the case might be. And just literally watch them suffer through the worst bits of what you’re considering doing. Because if you don’t do that, you’ll never know. And you’ll, you probably won’t roll out the worst process, you’ll probably pilot it, and then you’ll find it’s been a waste of time. So try to identify those sorts of things really early.

Peita Diamantidis
Yeah. Yeah. Before they cause chaos. Absolutely. So if somebody’s been listening, I think we need pets help. What how should they reach out? What should they do? What are some ways that they can sort of engage further with what you can do for them.

Patrick Flynn
So first up, you can get a whole bunch of free advice at Patrick Flynn dot info, we’ve got a blog on there. At the moment, we publish stuff there twice a month. So you can find something there that typically suits your fancy. And you can subscribe there as well. And that’s a really good way to just get some straight up free tips on how to run an efficient advice practice. We’ve also got little spot where you can book a virtual coffee on there. So you can Biomin schedule a time with me there or always on LinkedIn, you can just reach out to me it’s just Patrick Flynn on LinkedIn. There’s, there’s not too many of me on there. So you should be fine. So yeah, multiple ways to get get in touch with that website is Patrick Flynn dot info, which is usually the place where you’ll have the most at your fingertips.

Peita Diamantidis
Perfect. All right, advice, explorers. If you’d like to find any more of those details, of course, there’ll be in on in the episode show notes, like we always promise along with pets, LinkedIn details, so they’ll all be in there. So you can check it out there. Thank you. So for joining me here today so that we can really talk through this sort of natural tension between wonderful tech and automation and the consumer experience, I think that’ll have helped get people really thinking about it. So they’ll look at it almost consumer first, right? Put yourself in their shoes first. And then we can all get magic with the technology. So I really appreciate your time. Thank you for joining us.

Patrick Flynn
Always lots of fun, take care.

Peita Diamantidis
So I’m hoping that conversation was valuable, like what what’s longer than a normal episodes. And I really appreciate you sticking with us. But yeah, I’m hoping that sort of debate and as sort of considering things through that way, gave you some insight into your own view. So the thing with these feature episodes for me, and really, any of the episodes on the advice tech podcast is to help you form your own view. The last thing I want to do is tell you what your view is. I don’t think that’s helpful. But I want to help you think through or even gives you frameworks that will help you get to your conclusions on things, your conclusions on live chat, or chatbot, any of these things, you can because of the debates, say somebody like Pat and I have, then you can come to your own conclusions. Something I did want to plant some seeds on in terms of the way to think about some of these stuff, these are sort of more high level concepts is the difference between a service and experience and a transformation. And, you know, years ago, it was all about customer service. And that was about meeting a particular need, you know, a client has a query or a thing they need done, and you respond and you get it done. We’re providing great service, right, which is good experience, then is all about how that feels the interaction, how easy or difficult it is where it sits in the other things that you’re doing for them, and is the journey that they get to take in that moment or within that series then that might be a piece of advice and and so the experiences the advice experience, and what do they do and what are the meanings and all the elements and all the feelings that go with that. So that Second stage, the third stage, which is sort of the ninja level of looking at these things is transformation. And that is a collection of experiences that takes a customer or a client, from where they are when they first come to you to where they might be in a year in two years and three years. And that could be a collection of experiences they go through and they they transform, you know, they change their behavior, their outcome, what they can do, what they can achieve, what they believe their confidence. So it’s almost like you bolt together some experiences, such that they go on this journey and this arc of transformation. So those sort of layers are really important, because a lot of what we were talking about today was sat in that experience, focus, it’s a lot more about emotion and feeling and how it feels to do it, and what does it trigger and, you know, all those sort of things, whereas a service really is a function, you know, and, and I think you know, that one of the great things you can do is start thinking well belong beyond the function, because that’s where that’s where efficiency, focus and cost, focus sits is in the function. Once you start focusing on experience, you’ll get past that quickly. And if you start to think about where those experiences sit in the bigger transformation for your client, that’s when it gets quite magical. I’m early on in that journey myself, I’m not saying this as an expert, this is all of the research and digging I’m doing at the moment the reading I’m doing. So I’m just I encourage you to sort of think a little differently, you know, and challenge yourself to look at it that way for the way that you interact with your clients and prospects. Now, next week, we will be back to interview and advice to provider and provide you with another curiosity corner tip, I promise. However, if there is a topic you’d love me to cover as one of these feature episodes, or somebody you’d like me to pick their brain, you know, that’s sort of vaguely technology linked, then please either reach out to me on LinkedIn or reach out to me on the Ensembl community platform. I’d love to hear what what things you’d love to hear a conversation on. And in fact, we’re going to start including the SpeakPipe link in the episode show notes, which means you can click on that link and leave me a little voice message. If there’s something that you’d love to hear more about, or a conversation you’d love me to have with somebody. I’m more than happy to do it. Well, that’s all we’ve got for this week, be sure to subscribe to the podcast. So you’ll get your advice, tech fix automatically sent to you each Friday. And if you’d like a speaker at your next event, or maybe for a webinar for your group, then there’s a popular keynote I’ve been doing that’s getting a lot of interest at the moment that’s sort of tech overload to take delight, you know, and this is helping financial advisors sort of navigate the digital maze that might fit well for your audience, maybe even a workshop that follows up that to dive in and learn practical techniques to continually innovate in in advice practices. You know if any of that piques your interest, then please reach out to me on LinkedIn. Forward slash Peita M D PEITA. M D I’d love to have a chat. Otherwise, I’ll look forward to turning up in your earbuds next week. And remember advice explores: Stay curious