Your Client Experience Vision and Why It’s Important

Having a client experience vision can help you to clarify your offering, and guide decisions about your operation, service model, and business structure as a whole. The truth is that every business owner wants to create a seamless, memorable client experience. 

Changing the lives of your clients is the whole reason you started a business in the first place! So, let’s talk about how to craft your client experience vision, and how you can put it into action.

What’s your service offering?

When mapping out your service offering you should consider who your ideal clients are, and what problem your business solves for them. When it comes to financial planning or coaching, you can think about:

1. What stage of life is your client in?

2. What niche do you typically work with?

3. What financial questions do they have?

4. Are they facing any roadblocks that you can uniquely help to solve?

Most businesses don’t limit their services to just one tier of service, and you shouldn’t feel like you have to, either. Instead, consider creating several different service offerings based on your unique skill set and your ideal client. For example, you could have:

1. A one-time plan without implementation.

2. Subscription-based planning for clients with ongoing needs.

3. Investment management services for clients who want to implement their financial plan on their own, but outsource the management of their portfolio.

Each service offering should have a clear differentiator to make it easy for your ideal client to select the service that best fits their needs. 

How do you interact with clients in your service offering?

Every service model requires a different set of unique touchpoints that you and your team will have with your clients. When determining what touchpoints to include in your service offerings, consider:

1. How many meetings you want to have per year. You can base this off of both when it’s essential for clients to meet with you, and when you’d like to have a “slow season” for focusing on business development or your personal life.

2. How you will follow up with clients who fall into a one-time service model. These clients are often a perfect fit for a plan update and can generate recurring revenue.

3. How your onboarding and plan delivery experience will look. Your onboarding process is the first introduction to your business. You want it to reflect on how your ongoing service model is set up. For example, if you have a relatively hands-off relationship with clients and only meet a few times a year, you don’t want to hand-hold during onboarding. Set up onboarding touchpoints according to how the rest of your services look from a client perspective.

How do you want your clients to feel?

This is where the rubber meets the road – the reason you started your business in the first place. Creating a client experience means putting yourself in your clients’ shoes. How do you want them to feel when they work with you? 

For most financial planners and coaches, the answer to this question is simple. You want your clients to feel empowered, calm, and confident in the solution you’ve delivered. If you think about these emotions, you can already start to see a client experience start to take form. 

To help empower your clients, you want to offer a collaborative solution that allows them to gain knowledge and feel confident in implementing their plan. To offer clients a sense of calm, you can create a service offering that either offers a detailed one time plan that soothes their worries or build a fully outsourced planning solution that completely takes their financial life off of their plate. Most advisors find some sort of middle ground and create something that can be collaborative upfront, and then relieve the stress of their clients by taking care of all the financial details after the initial solution is created.

Creating a Scalable Vision

When mapping out your client vision, keep in mind that you may need to incorporate different service calendars for each service model you offer. Start with your core package, then back into the smaller ones to create a scalable solution and ensure that you’re never biting off more than you can chew.

By mapping out your core service offering calendar you’re able to identify:

1. What your client experience looks like for your core offering.

2. When your “busy” seasons will be, or when you schedule surge meetings.

3. What other professionals you will need to coordinate with (like a tax planner or paraplanner) to serve your clients well.

4. How your team can hone their skillset to improve your client experience and free up your own time. 

5. When you have availability to hold client events, focus on business development, and plug in smaller service offerings to your calendar (like one time plans). 

Remember that as you identify the key elements of your service model, you can start to build systems and processes for each step your clients take. Document everything in your CRM, and gather all relevant information from your clients upfront to ensure that you’re able to create a truly scalable client experience that matches your unique vision. 

Have questions? Reach out! Our team at Level Best would love to help you create an operation that mirrors your client experience vision.