Their worldview has undergone a seismic shift, and it’s coloring their relationship with their financial advisors.
This year, this group’s overall financial self-confidence was significantly lower, as they were more concerned with not reaching financial goals and more likely to feel their plans are inadequate to reach those goals, the survey found. They were also more likely to say their lives have been impacted by the last couple of years and more likely to feel they have a lot of negative stress.
“Remember, this is a high-net-worth audience. These feelings weren’t specifically tied to [lack of] wealth. We had people with $10 million saying, ‘I don’t feel secure,’ or ‘I don’t feel in control,’” she said. “What we discovered, though, was this was tightly correlated to how they felt about you.”
That correlation meant their net promoter score (how likely they were to recommend their advisor and a proxy for the quality of the relationship) was half that of other age groups, and their levels of loyalty and satisfaction were also considerably lower.
In fact, the survey found that all of the key metrics used to measure the quality of a relationship between client and advisor had been impacted by how the client was feeling about the future.
And the lower the self-confidence, even for external reasons, the lower the client satisfaction with their advisor, Littlechild said. Only 32% of clients with low self-confidence were very satisfied with their advisor, while 76% of clients with high self-confidence were very satisfied.
“A massive statistical difference there,” she said. “And so I think we’re going to have to think seriously about segmenting our client experience. We can’t just say, ‘We meet with our clients X number of times and this is how we do it.’”
That means shifting to having service tiers not just based on wealth but also based on age and stage, she said, and having a set of tactics specifically for the 45- to 54-year-olds, certainly, but also for the under-45s who represent the future of a sustainable business.
“When we can see that some clients are worried about this and others are worried about that, I think it’s driving us to a point—and thankfully technology will support this—where we may need to start personalizing the kind of content that we share knowing what’s really on their minds,” she said. “This is where understanding more about how clients are thinking and feeling can actually help you to engage and to grow your business.”
For existing clients, Littlechild suggested advisors help their clients co-create meeting agendas by sending out a survey that hits on topics and feelings ahead of the meeting and then using the results to influence the conversation in additional to the advisory nuts and bolts that need to be covered. And if the client is a couple, both halves should get the survey separately to reveal hidden concerns.