The ‘all-encompassing’ role of the client experience

Speaking on the latest episode of the ifa podcast, Corey Wastle, chief executive of Verse Wealth, said he is glad that there has been a greater focus on the client experience in recent years as it is “the most important thing that we do”.

“It’s all-encompassing, really,” Mr Wastle told ifa.

“The client experience is really anything that touches the client. The advice, of course, touches the client. The adviser-client conversations touch the client, but there’s lots of other things that touch the client.

“That could be the reception that they walk into. It could be how that room smells; it could be the technology they engage with. It could be how they book a meeting. It could be how they reschedule a meeting. It could be how they share information pre-meeting … The list could be a laundry list, but in essence, anything that touches the client, it’s part of their client experience.”

According to Mr Wastle, too often, advisers looking at things through a traditional lens only consider the advice and what’s going into a statement of advice (SOA) as part of the client experience, but it’s “much more diverse than that”.

He compared the delivery of advice to a restaurant, where the food is ostensibly what consumers are there for, yet so much more affects how they feel about the restaurant.

“We all know that the experience you have at a restaurant is a lot more than the food that they put on the plate,” he said.

“It’s how are you greeted when you walk in? How do they smile? It’s how friendly are they? It’s how well does the waitress or the waiter know the menu? It’s how do they handle an error? It’s the level of diligence that the plate is prepared with.”

Similar to the way that a customer might not return or recommend a restaurant if the service is terrible, despite how good the food is, Mr Wastle said the same goes for advice.

“You might get great advice from an adviser, but if you had to wait four months to get the advice and the whole experience was cumbersome and friction-laden and it took 100 hours when you thought it was going to take 90 minutes, you won’t go back and you won’t recommend them,” he explained.

Values, intentions, and financial wellbeing

A large part of the client experience at Verse Wealth, Mr Wastle explained, is wrapped up in the “core tenets” of values, intentions, and financial wellbeing.

“Values are the things that are really important in someone’s life. Everyone’s got values, even if they’ve never clarified them before,” he said.

“When you sit down and navigate the conversation with them, they’ll come to light. And values can be things like family, health and wellbeing, balance, security, freedom, adventure, community.

“People will have values and will have reasons why those values are important to them. So, we’ll capture the value, we’ll capture the reason why it’s important to them and what it means to them. We’ll also capture out of 10, they’ll rate it how well it’s happening in their life.”

The intentions are around goals and priorities but with a less firm structure, with Mr Wastle noting that “goals often can be intimidating and create a bit of rigidity where it’s not always needed”.

“The intentions are the things that we will plan around and we will strategise around and we will do the modelling to show them how on track or off track they might be. The intentions evolve quite regularly over time, just because priorities in life evolve for all of us and we’re not great at guessing how they might evolve,” he added.

“Then financial wellbeing, the third tenet here, that is really a measure of how people feel about their financial life.”

The Verse Wealth view, Mr Wastle said, is that regardless of seeing a financial adviser or having a strategy in place, there is no guarantee that clients feel the way they want to about their finances.

“It doesn’t mean you’ve got rid of all the stresses; it doesn’t mean you’ve got the confidence and the clarity and the sense of control that you really want in the areas you want it,” he said.

“We get clients to typically, over their smartphone, complete a 27-question quiz. Takes about four minutes on average, you do it on your instincts and it gives you a score out of 100. Financial wellbeing score. It breaks the score down in six different areas of your financial life, things like income and expenses, goals and planning, sleep and retirement, property and debts, etc.

“It gives the adviser this really nuanced insight into how they’re feeling about some different areas of their finances.”

Understanding the client’s confidence levels and where they might feel out of control or stressed, the adviser can operate as not just a strategist, but a coach to the client.

“Those are the foundations of the client experience at Verse.”

To hear more from Corey Wastle, tune in here.