In an ever-changing digital landscape, omnichannel strategies help businesses to create unified experiences. Omnichannel strategies can benefit many industries, from eCommerce to online banking.
An omnichannel strategy focuses on creating a harmonious system of channels. For wealth management, this presents a unique opportunity to personalize customer experiences.
Trustworthy wealth management is a priority of top clients. In this article, we will discuss how omnichannel strategies affect wealth management. Plus, we will cover how these strategies help build a more customer-centric approach.
Understanding the Omnichannel Strategy
Omnichannel originated to provide customers with a more seamless shopping experience. It has developed into a strategy that aims to create unity across all business channels.
Let’s say a business has a service to sell and a webpage for registration. An omnichannel approach allows the customer to also register in person or over the phone.
Omnichannel strategies focus on accessibility and communication. They provide 3 key benefits:
- Enhanced Interactions: Omnichannel optimizes every point of contact with customers. This ensures they always receive the same quality of service.
- Improved Client Relations: Each interaction provides the customer with a personalized experience. This allows the specific needs of each client to be directly addressed.
- Greater Overall Value: Every customer has different preferences. Allowing customers to receive products and services how they want is crucial. Providing choices boost the overall value of the experience for customers.
Personalizing the Wealth Management Experience
The financial industry only continues to evolve technologically. Being part of the industry, the wealth management sector is also digitally evolving.
This sector is full of innovation and enthusiasm. As a result, customers are quickly adjusting and changing their expectations.
To keep up with shifting demands, it is crucial to focus on the customers themselves. There are a few key factors currently affecting customer expectations to consider:
- Mobile Phones: The days of visiting your wealth management provider in-person are gone. With smartphones being more popular than ever, customers expect accessible information. Wealth management firms must develop platforms and applications for their clients. These will help to provide easy access to financial accounts.
- Interest in Education and Advice: Many new tools for finance and investment pop up every day. Yet, there is a shortage of educational resources. Providing education and advice to clients helps create a clear standard and set of goals.
- Personal Involvement: Technology allows clients to be heavily involved in their finances. They will soon expect to be able to access their wealth management accounts with the touch of a finger. This means the experience needs to feel as personalized as possible. The development and design must come together to provide a seamless experience.
Omnichannel Prioritizes Transparency and Collaboration
Omnichannel can help you to create a personalized experience for your clients.
Three key elements the strategy provides include:
- Transparency: Omnichannel strategies provide the same information and services through all channels. To do so, the processes become fairly straightforward and transparent. This helps the processes to be simple enough to complete on any channel.
- Collaboration: An omnichannel strategy needs all departments of a business to work together. Clear and effective communication leads to greater collaboration. As a result, progress and productivity can be significantly boosted.
- Cross-Functionality: Working as a team requires staff members to develop new skills. This helps to create more well-rounded and diversified skillsets in business teams.
Broadening Relationships with Clients
By enabling omnichannel communication, wealth management firms increase their opportunities with clients.
Many touchpoints with customers end up overlooked in the financial space. Creating a digital presence that your clients can rely on is paramount.
Providing many opportunities for communication helps your customers to feel taken care of. An omnichannel strategy will help you implement solutions focused on the customer experience.
For example, you may need to create a responsive interface for customers to use on your website. Your omnichannel strategy will help determine what information to relay through this design.
As a result, your customers receive a responsive system designed for their needs.
Gaining a Customer-Centric Viewpoint
In a world moving towards total digitization, maintaining human connection is important. Adopting a customer-centric approach is fundamental for achieving an omnichannel strategy.
Omnichannel strategies pair well with other customer-centric methods, such as DevOps and Agile. Finding ways to integrate and connect these methods is essential.
By focusing on the customer’s needs, you will experience much greater customer satisfaction. This is especially important when dealing with large sums of wealth. Clients will expect security and smart investments to ensure their wealth is protected.
Building Digital Trust
As wealth management moves into the digital space, building up digital trust is crucial. Clients will have differing levels of technological literacy. As a result, personalized service is all the more important.
When designing your platform and systems, an omnichannel strategy will help you to maintain uniformity. Keeping your channels unified provides customers with consistency. This consistency shapes customer expectations, thus affecting customer satisfaction.
At its core, omnichannel aims to strengthen relationships with clientele. Using this type of strategy helps to show your authority and competency in the digital space.
Connecting with Younger Generations
Older generations are less accustomed to rapidly changing technologies. By comparison, Millennials and Gen Z were raised by technology.
As the younger generations grow into adulthood, wealth management professionals must find ways to connect. These generations respond to and adapt more quickly to change As such, using innovation to attract the younger generations is key.
With an omnichannel strategy, you can greatly widen your scope of outreach. The younger generations have a dominant presence in digital spaces, making technology one of the best ways to get in touch.
Boosting Digital Retention of Clients
One of the biggest considerations for wealth management professionals is client retention.
At the beginning of a client’s journey, they may open an account with only 10k to 20k saved. As the client grows and begins to invest more confidently, this wealth will grow into the hundreds of thousands and even millions.
The key to success in wealth management is to be just as considerate of existing customers’ needs as you are of new ones.
To keep existing customers satisfied, financial institutions must constantly pay attention to how customer demands are changing. These changing expectations include:
- Faster Deliveries: Customers expect software and applications to be delivered with speed and efficiency.
- Personalized Service: Digital services allow for a much more personalized experience.
- Simplicity in Design: Customers want businesses to take advanced technologies and simplify them to be easily used and accessed.
As covered, omnichannel is tremendous for building a more customer-centric approach. In truth, an omnichannel strategy is potentially one of the best ways to boost client retention during the technological era.
Nurturing Client Relationships with Omnichannel
While enticing new clients is a necessary practice, nurturing relationships with existing clients is also essential.
Omnichannel strategies inherently aid in keeping in touch with existing clientele. By opening up channels of communication and business, omnichannel makes it easier for clients to stay in the know.
Additionally, omnichannel works to ensure all clients receive the same level and quality of service regardless of the channel being used. This helps existing clients to feel that their time is valued equally to new clients.
Moreover, omnichannel ensures clients feel confident in the services being provided. This helps to keep clients in a state of trust and ease that is necessary for long-term retention.
Shifting to Digital Interactions with Clients
As the financial industry begins to better understand how to leverage new technologies, it is crucial to be mindful of digital interactions with clients.
If digital interactions undergo too many major changes, this can be offputting to clients. Once a client’s trust has been disturbed, it can be difficult to win it back.
Omnichannel helps to ensure changes to digital interactions are small and continuous. This keeps systems and platforms operating smoothly. Plus, it makes the changes harder to notice, making the digital interaction a more frictionless experience.
Using Omnichannel to Enhance AI
Artificial intelligence and machine learning will have major impacts on client retention in the coming years. Wealth management firms will need to use omnichannel to better enable AI services.
There are many ways AI can aid in client retention, including:
- Robo Advisors: AI can be used to build chatbots and other messaging programs that provide personalized advice to clients. This automated service offers great value to both customers and staff.
- Predictive AI: A powerful capability of AI is the ability to predict trends. Financial markets can be tumultuous. Having predictive AI helps wealth management clients to feel that their money is secure and protected.
- Enhanced Analytics: To embrace changing client needs, financial institutions need to track behavior. With AI, your business can track and analyze customer behaviors much more closely.
Final Thoughts
Like all sectors, wealth management is seeing major changes arise from technological innovation.
As these changes occur, financial institutions need to adapt. This means focusing on the customers, their needs, and how they communicate with providers.
By utilizing omnichannel strategies, the wealth management sector will be able to find great success in the coming years. These strategies will help to ensure a seamless customer experience and put the customer’s needs first.
To learn more about omnichannel strategy for wealth management, contact CPQi today!
Also be sure to check out our Robotic Process Automation (RPA) page down below!
👉 Visit our official RPA in banking page here!
Written by Paul Morris, Chief Sales Officer at CPQi, the leading provider of digital transformation for the financial markets.
