As National Customer Service Week comes to a close, it is worth recognising the advisers, paraplanners and administrators who go above and beyond for clients every day. However, should we also ask why they have to do it quite so often in the first place.
Earlier this week, we looked at the friction customers experience within an organisation. This time, the focus is on advisers and the complexity they are often left to navigate across the wider advice ecosystem. The client experiences one advice relationship, the adviser however may have to navigate many firms, systems and processes to deliver it.
Advisers have become the industry’s integration layer
A platform can meet its service level, a provider can complete its part on time, a DFM can deliver the right reporting yet the adviser firm can still be left logging into multiple systems, rekeying information, reconciling updates, chasing progress and working out where a process has stalled.
From the client’s perspective, there is often one person they hold accountable, their adviser. That’s not because the adviser caused the problem, but because they are the person the client trusts to explain what is happening and get things moving. The adviser and support team therefore end up translating multiple services into one coherent client experience.
Some of that will always be part of a good advice proposition. The issue is when chasing, duplicating and working around gaps become normal service delivery and start taking time away from the work clients value most. At that point, the adviser is becoming the integration layer between organisations that do not connect as seamlessly as they should.
The known problem is fragmentation. The next question is how we measure it
None of this will be new to anyone working in the advice market. Firms have talked about integration, data sharing, multiple portals and adviser efficiency for years. The more interesting question is whether we still measure adviser experience too narrowly inside individual organisations rather than measuring the effort created across the whole ecosystem.
A provider can have a strong adviser satisfaction score and still contribute to a journey that is hard to navigate once other providers, platforms and systems are involved. Perhaps the better question is not simply, “How good is our adviser experience?” but more “How much work does an adviser have to do between all of our experiences?”
How many systems must an adviser visit to answer one client question? How often is the same information entered more than once? How much time is spent finding out where something is rather than progressing it? Finally, when a case crosses organisational boundaries, who owns the end to end outcome?
Use technology to remove effort, not just automate it
Technology and AI can help, but the goal should not simply be to make advisers better at navigating complexity. If AI finds information faster, monitors progress or chases the next organisation on the adviser’s behalf, that may improve productivity but it can also make a fragmented model easier to live with.
The bigger opportunity is to reduce the cross ecosystem effort itself, better connected data, clearer ownership across hand offs and technology that removes unnecessary steps rather than simply speeding them up.
The next extra mile should be a shorter one
Going the extra mile should mean doing something exceptional for a client, not running a relay race between providers, platforms and systems just to deliver the expected level of service.
If some of our most capable people spend large parts of their day joining the ecosystem together, the answer cannot always be to help them run faster. Sometimes the better answer is to shorten the course.
If this sounds familiar, talk to Simplify. We help firms look beyond the performance of individual services and understand the adviser journey across organisational boundaries identifying where supplier relationships, data, process, technology and ownership create unnecessary effort, and where that complexity can be removed rather than simply managed.
Warren Bright
Lead Consultant
