The feedback has been really positive. We’ve engaged more with the people who were disengaged and the people who were engaged are happy too.
The thing that makes me proud of this is the last page which is a nice big action plan. What needs to be done, by who and when. Stuff we need to do, they need to do and a section for notes. That’s the bit the clients like the most.
I think we are getting better engagement on the issues we need engagement on.
A classic one is when you need to think about your estate planning, like a will. You can say the same thing five years in a row and not get action.
When we replaced that with a section which is bright red and an according action plan, that resulted in noticeable upticks.
I have some particularly detail-oriented clients who want more information, and the 5 per cent of people who want that now still get it, but the 95 per cent who just want the answers are no longer being provided with that.
Feedback is really important. Up until this point we were mostly just guessing what clients wanted. This was the result of dealing with 10 or 15 of a stratified sample of our clients and getting their feedback.
I had to keep thinking about that old phrase about writing a shorter letter if only I had the time. We had to put the time into this to make it shorter and more succinct.
You have to be prepared to kill your sacred cows. I really liked those financial planning reports with the charts. I couldn’t understand why someone wouldn’t want to read a nice Voyant output with the bars and the colours and the charts.
I went to the clients I thought were most likely to tell me that they wanted to read those and all of them said I could drop that bit. They said they liked it in the room when we were talking but they said they didn’t need to read it afterwards.
There is always more to do. I don’t think that this will be in the form that it is. It mostly goes out via PDF in a client portal. I’d like to bring it off the page a bit. I’ve seen interesting innovation in this area.
There’s a company called Hundreds and Thousands which provides their reporting in video form with an AI woman reading it out.
For the first page, which is a very conversational summary, it would be great if the adviser could do a two min video to camera and offer it as an option in the letter."
