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It used to just be three propositions: price, quality, and convenience...
You could have it cheap and fast, but it wouldn't be good. You could have it good and cheap, but it wouldn't be fast (you get the idea 😉 ), but now, there's another.
Recent research shared with me by Laura Dinneen - Head of Nudge at Westpac Next - at our recent workshop at the LTMA Conference in Melbourne spelled it out...
86% of clients are willing to pay more for a great client experience
2020 is the year experience passes price and product as the most significant brand differentiator.
This matters for a whole bunch of reasons - retention, referrals, renewals, fee sensitivity, fair value and transitioning legacy client - but also because in an industry where the ability to compete on price and product is increasingly restricted, it has to be about something more.
Thankfully, there are many many examples of it to draw from. Amazon is famously dedicated to it's customer experience. Airbnb is another big experience success story.
Huge organizations spending millions every year to form a relationship with their clients that can withstand external influence so the decision to buy or not to buy, to continue or not to continue, rarely comes into question.
Here's the good news.
You're already halfway there.
As advisers, you already have the personal relationship they spend millions to build, already have the hotline to know clients better than they know themselves and to make switching not even a side-thought.... as long as you can deliver.
PRACTICAL EXPERIENCE
At our recent The Leveraged Advice Firm two-day Excelerator event, we covered off the four stages our program members are nailing to really own this space which includes:
1. Understanding what clients value, what they're already doing well in this space and what the opportunities are
2. Designing the "Wow!" or, as Airbnb showed us, what an 11-star advice experience looks like to work backward from there.
3. Mapping the journey both across that first year, and all the touchpoints and emotional impacts into year two, three and well beyond.
4. How to track and shape because, as we know, no delivery model ever survives the first contact with clients. It has to evolve using data and human interactions.
We ran this Excelerator at BridgeClimb Sydney.
It gave us an opportunity to both analyse the BridgeClimb business itself and the practical experience of going up the bridge to ask: "What is it that this highly successful experience-driven business, operating in a hugely legislatively complex environment, do that delivers the same amazing outcome time after time after time?"
And the answer was simple.
A clearly defined business system that frees humans to create the experience.
So many learnings, I wanted to share a few.
THE HUMAN ELEMENT
Our guide up the bridge was a Professional.
The way he drew attention to the stories behind the bridge, pointed out the surrounding, distracted people's attention from the height at the right time, and joked in a style that is iconically Australian. He knew how to make the journey memorable.
Without that, it's a bunch of people silently walking up and back down again.
But what allowed him to do that was a meticulously planned timeline of setup, check-ins, milestones and communication points that we barely noticed.
But it was there.
A highly systemised business, backed by a training system to match, taking 3.5 million people up and down a bridge safely for the last twenty years.
THE VALUE PROP
Despite that, BridgeClimb was still about one simple core value proposition.
It wasn't the promise of Nick's wit that drew us in. It wasn't the stories on the way up that made us want to do the climb. The up and the down wasn't the value. BridgeClimb is about reaching the summit.
This is another reason I felt it was relevant.
Your value to clients is about reaching their summit.
That's why they engage, and it's important never to lose sight of that, or make the proposition about how you do it.
EXPERIENCE = SUMMIT + JOURNEY
The two can't exist without each other.
1. The promise of the summit makes me engage.
2. What happens between start and finish is where it becomes memorable.
There was so much I could share about this topic and from the workshop. It's huge, important and something I'm going to really enjoy working on this year.
I wanted to share these two, most of all, because if you can nail your value and deliver the human elements in between (even in amongst everything else demanding your attention) then your business will be in good shape.
If you are also interested in more about experience and the work we're doing this year, you can do one of three things.
1. Let me know your take on client experience. Do you see it as something that's important? Are you working on it this year? Are you interested in more insight? If you're in the latter, email me and I'll share.
2. If you've already made a decision that this is something that's important to you too. I am running a six-week program in March called Ultimate Client Engagement. It comes off the back of the launch of our six-week Bulletproof Pricing program and I'll be sharing what our participants have to say about it shortly. We are taking early registrations now (with early bird pricing) until 6 Mar (or until sold out).
3. I'm also considering running a full-day workshop at the BridgeClimb again. To run you through some of the practical things, the journey, the framework, the tools that you can put in place, but also to share with you the experience myself and the program members had that had such an impact. Click here to join the waitlist. Sounds interesting? Drop me an email at info@audere.com.au
Finally, I'd love to get some feedback from you, a valued reader of this blog, around how we might be able to improve your experience. If you've got 3 mins, pls click here. I'd appreciate your thoughts. Thank You!