‘The technology is there now’: Using AI to improve the client experience

Presenting at the Adviser Innovation Summit in Sydney this week, Sue Viskovic, general manager, consulting for Vital Business Partners (VBP), discussed how advisers can utilise artificial intelligence (AI) within their practice to enhance their clients’ experience and make their processes more efficient.

In her session, Process Automation and AI - Can advice firms leverage these yet?, Viskovic explained how new technologies can be leveraged to enhance advice processes and complement the work of advisers, rather than replace them.

“It can improve your client experience by helping you respond to people’s questions faster, it can reduce errors in your work. It can enable your team to do the highest and best work and not have to do some of the lower level, really simple tasks that don’t require the nuances of the human brain to execute,” she said.

“It is highly unlikely that AI is going to replace your role as a financial adviser because people want to have that authentic human experience. I want you to think about using AI right now as part of your extended team.”

Viskovic explained what she believes it could look like for advisers to employ AI to automate some aspects of client interactions and advice processes.

“When you sit in front of them you have a very detailed conversation and you get right to the heart of what matters to them. You can have really good meaningful conversations. You don’t have to be writing everything down. You don’t have to go through a fact find and get data,” she explained.

“Your file notes are automated, the action items are done, there’s a file note summary of that meeting and that is sent back to the client very clearly articulating the value that you’re going to provide them. The next part of the process is implemented, your paraplanners are ready with the information that they’ve got and where they can gather the rest of the missing data.

“Within two weeks’ time, when they come back for that next meeting, you’re gonna have a really well constructed strategy available to talk to them about and all of the modelling will be done and you’ll have a really engaging meeting.”

Viskovic added: “The reality is the technology is there now for you to be able to do these things. However, for most of you, your business is not structured in such a way that you’d be able to leverage them.”

When considering where advisers may be able to employ these automations, she said to consider less complex tasks and parts of the advice process where they are currently lagging.

“Look at that frequency and complexity. If they’re less complex tasks, if they don’t require a multitude of different inputs on it, then that could be something you could automate,” Viskovic said.

“Think about your performance analysis, look at what’s the slow turnaround time on key tasks and which steps in the process of causing it. You may not necessarily be able to automate it, but you might be able to take a different approach to it.”

While AI can provide opportunities to enhance business processes, Viskovic emphasised the importance of proceeding with caution.

“There are a lot of pitfalls when it comes to using AI. If I had to summarise it, the two things would be, protect your data and check the output. You can’t necessarily completely rely on it,” she said.

“When you start using AI beyond just content creation and you’re actually using it to do some analytics and potential creation of strategies, you do still need to make sure that you’re checking it.”