Translating Client Insights Into Exceptional Service

A client-centric mindset can help advisors gain profound insights and deliver differentiated value.

Mohan Sawhney is a globally recognized management consultant, author, and academic. He is the McCormick Foundation Professor of Technology and the Director of the Center for Research in Technology & Innovation at the Kellogg School of Management. Prof. Sawhney has written seven management books as well as dozens of influential articles in leading academic journals and managerial publications. His most recent book, “The Sentient Enterprise: The Evolution of Business Decision Making,” was on the Wall Street Journal bestseller list. A pioneer in online executive education, Prof. Sawhney has created courses covering topics such as digital marketing strategies, product strategy, artificial intelligence applications for growth, and the Kellogg chief product officer program.

Each year, our SPDR® MasterClass program draws on the expertise of industry-leading practitioners like Prof. Sawhney to help advisors grow their businesses, keep pace with change, and better satisfy clients’ evolving needs.

Client insight is a seductive yet elusive concept. Amid a challenging environment — characterized by a massive generational wealth transfer and rapid growth of digital solutions — advisors need to gain a deeper understanding of clients’ needs to craft a differentiated client value proposition. Unearthing clients’ true motivations, however, is easier said than done. During a MasterClass session, management expert Mohan Sawhney discussed how advisors can gain profound client insights that go beyond the obvious.

Study “Jobs to Be Done” to Become Truly Client-centric

To create a differentiated value proposition, advisors must identify and satisfy a client’s unarticulated and unmet needs — and there is no way to achieve this without tapping into an insatiable desire to learn about clients with a beginner’s mind. A client-centric approach is essential.

How do you know if your team is truly client-obsessed? Ask these seven questions:

1. Do we put clients at the center of all decisions?
2. Do we have a culture of curiosity?
3. Do all of us get out of the building and visit clients?
4. Are our KPIs aligned with client success?
5. Do we have a clearly defined and authentic brand promise?
6. Do we have clear ownership over measurement and improvement of the client experience?
7. Do we allow clients to engage with us across all touchpoints seamlessly and flawlessly?

To strengthen their client-centric mindset, advisors can employ the “jobs to be done” concept, built on the idea that clients buy products or services because they have a problem to solve. With an understanding of the “job” for which clients find themselves “hiring” a product or service, companies can more accurately develop and market products. Jobs can be functional (what the client wants to do), emotional (how the client wants to feel), or social (how the client wants to be perceived by others). For instance, the functional job that clients want from their retirement investment plan is to “have enough money for their post-retirement years” and the emotional job they want is to “feel secure about their post-retirement life.” Typically, clients are less concerned with the asset mix that gets them to this goal; they just want products that do jobs for them.

Try creating a four-part job statement that describes the persona or job performer, the situation they find themselves in, their motivation, and the outcome they expect to achieve. Job statements can help advisors understand why someone selected a particular product to get a job done, and how to get the job done better. Job statements can also help advisors focus their solution development on high-opportunity jobs: client jobs that are important, unsatisfied, and frequent.

Listen, Observe, and Collaborate to Generate Client Insights

By embracing a client-centric approach, advisors position themselves to gather deep insights. Client insights are fundamental truths about client motivations and behavior derived from a disciplined approach that advisors can leverage to create client value and competitive advantage.

Generating insights from clients, however, can be difficult. “Clients often don’t want to, and sometimes simply cannot, articulate their needs and wants,” said Prof. Sawhney. “They edit out solutions that they don’t know are possible, tend to ask for ‘me-too’ features that competitors already offer, or offer solutions when asked about problems instead of discussing the outcomes they really want.”

To overcome these challenges, advisors can use a combination of strategies, such as:

• Listening with surveys, focus groups, and in-depth interviews
• Observing with ethnography, client visits, social data mining, and product telemetry
• Collaborating with client advisory boards, online crowdsourcing, and co-creation

Client visits can be particularly powerful for advisors. By stepping out of the wealth management world and immersing themselves in the client’s domain, visits can help advisors understand clients’ real priorities and pain points.

Advisors can use client visits to:

• Discover unmet needs
• Find out how their product fits into the client’s broader solution set
• Understand what clients think and feel about the advisor and their firm

Delivering differentiated value is critically dependent on understanding client motivations and needs. Armed with a “jobs to be done” mindset and a commitment to becoming client-obsessed, advisors can empower themselves to gather valuable insights and translate them into exceptional service.

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