How to apply system and design thinking in an advice practice

Cable Rickard, general manager wrap solutions and product integration at Insignia Financial, recommended advisers review the systems in their practice and how their clients and business operate within them.

“My suggestion is to start small by identifying pitfalls in your processes and experiment to come up with solutions that improves the client experience,” he told ifa ahead of the Adviser Innovation Summit 2024.

“Firstly, consider all client interactions, whether they are in your front office, back office or those hidden functions that go into servicing a client. Then, map these out as an end-to-end process that links them all together. This will provide you insights into how your client is feeling at different steps of the process and highlight positives and pain points in your client interactions.”

Rickard, who is responsible for managing and developing the Expand platform, said advisers could then consider how to tweak their processes to eradicate those pain points and increase client satisfaction, reduce operational costs, and grow their business.

In addition, advisers should seek feedback from all staff within their business about their processes to identify areas for improvements, particularly in their back-office functions.

“You can then meet with your team, say, every Monday morning to share a pain point of the week and brainstorm ideas to remove them,” Rickard said.

“You don’t need to commit weeks or months. Start with 15-minute time slots and see where that takes you.”

For example, advisers could review how they onboard new clients, conduct their fact find, generate their statements of advice, execute their advice, and communicate the entire process to their clients.

“If you map out your end-to-end process, you’ll see just how many interactions you have,” Rickard pointed out.

“You may think every one of your steps is necessary but by reviewing your entire system, you’ll learn many lessons on what steps you can remove to improve the interactions with your clients.”

This could reduce administrative tasks and enable advisers to spend more time with clients, leading to greater client satisfaction, Rickard said.

“While measuring client satisfaction via something like a net promoter score can be a good overall measure, it won’t uncover the underlying components of the client journey that may require improvement,” Rickard said.

Rickard suggested advisers map out the typical client journey, what an average client experiences in interacting with them in a particular window of time and use that as a basis for creating new measures.

“You need to break down each element to identify the pros and cons and improve the client experience.”

Rickard’s comments preceded the Adviser Innovation Summit, where he will speak about how advice practices could harness big business agile thinking to boost efficiencies, responsiveness, and client interactions.

Moreover, MLC and the Expand platform – which are brands of the Insignia Financial Group – have joined the summit as a platinum partner.

Rickard said the partnership allows the group to impart insights with advisers on how they could improve their value proposition and client satisfaction and learn about industry trends and innovations from other professionals and businesses.

“As one of the largest wrap platform providers, we want to be a part of the conversation by sharing our learnings while embracing and listening to what others say,” he concluded.

To hear more from Cable Rickard about how advisers could use systems thinking to thrive in their practice, come along to the Adviser Innovation Summit 2024.

It will be held on Thursday, 6 June at Zinc at Fed Square, Melbourne.

Click here to buy tickets and don’t miss out!

For more information, including agenda and speakers, click here.