What's Been Missing From Client Experience: Humans

Digital experiences from Amazon, Netflix and Google have set a new bar for customer expectations around on-demand, mobile, and hyper-personalization. Yet they are missing something very important: human connection. If anything, they have conditioned people to stare down at their phones instead of connecting with one another and contributed to the loneliness epidemic.

For all the talk about customer or client experience, I've seen that businesses too are largely missing the mark by focusing on digital-only experiences. Most firms and their various channels have undergone digital transformations over the past few years. Yet in high-consideration categories such as financial advice and enterprise software, the majority of these experiences occurs with the field relationship manager. A human being. This represents a tremendous untapped opportunity.

The CRM Data Challenge

How can firms that claim to be best-in-class in client experience exclude human interactions from their strategy? Customer relationship management (CRM) software, expected to hit over $80 billion in the U.S. alone by 2025, was supposed to capture customer data from the field, but in the majority of cases, it fails, according to Harvard Business Review. The repercussions are significant: Suboptimal products and journeys are suggested, clients are turned off by the spam, and ROI isn't achieved.

The heart of the issue is that CRM is dependent on salespeople to do manual data entry and manual data look-ups. The self-reported nature of all of this data means it is often missing, inaccurate or unreliable. When you then apply predictive analytics to this data, the output is often nonsensical. It's the classic “garbage in, garbage out” problem.

For example, a financial advisor might meet with a client about restructuring finances in light of the client taking on caring for an aging parent. The advisor and client work out a new strategy, but the advisor doesn’t have a chance to update the system before an email blast goes out trying to sell additional services. The right hand hasn’t talked with the left; therefore, the client receives exactly the wrong message at the wrong time — exactly what an organization just made a significant CRM, marketing cloud, and customer data platform (CDP) investment to ensure wouldn't happen.

In reality, the information field reps get quickly and directly from clients via phone, text, or 1-1 email is far richer than what corporate teams populate into CRMs. The human touch from a trusted advisor – whether delivered as a personal text, call, email, or social media message – is far more valuable, influential, and effective than any automated email, corporate text, or notification. In most cases, this vital, sales-sourced data is not shared with or entered into a corporate CRM. As a result, CRM solutions become less effective because they aren't actually a source of truth.

A Better Way Forward

In regulated industries such as financial services, however, there is an unexpected way forward. Regulators like FINRA, SEC, IIROC, and state and provincial insurance commissions require all advisor communications to be captured and retained. Leveraging this interaction data, we can for the first time complete the missing link and deliver unprecedented visibility to the enterprise. By automatically logging all advisor communications with clients and prospects across social media interactions, emails, mobile calls, and compliant text messaging, Hearsay Systems has increased firms' CRM data by 10-15X, resulting in higher CRM adoption and more accurate analytics. Orchestrating compliant omnichannel communications for advisors, as it turns out, enhances analytics, adoption, and actionability of core systems, CRM, CDP, and other enterprise systems.

In the age of artificial intelligence, data analytics and automation, completing the missing data picture and human-led client experience is critical. Even the smallest details carry weight and can make the difference in adding or retaining a client. As such, companies need to be aware of the problem in order to fix it. They must figure out ways to tap into every possible data point so corporate teams can help sales teams be more productive — whether that means prompting them to reach out during a key moment or suggesting cross-sell or upsell opportunities.

Artificial intelligence and machine learning are key to this future. Systems, algorithms and prompts make it faster and easier than ever before for sales reps to enter data into a system that can provide precisely the guidance they need at the right moment, whether it is proactively supplying a message that resonates or simply following up on something from a recent conversation. This frees up the rep to concentrate more on the human factor — building trust and positive relationships in a way that only personal interaction can, making it a true personalized human client experience.

An edited version of this article was first published in Forbes.