A key to success for advisors in coming years will be enhancing their engagement with clients, says Carley Dillon, vice president of client experience at Brighton Jones, a Seattle wealth management and holistic planning firm with $8 billion in assets under management.
Brighton Jones intends to focus on client engagement in 2021 and other advisory firms should be doing the same, Dillon said in an interview Tuesday. Engagement can be built in part by increasing services beyond the basics of investment help, sponsoring client events and creating planning advice panels.
Dillon has experience launching start-up companies and a background in technology, a background she’s brought to help Brighton Jones in its engagement efforts. The firm serves clients with at least $1 million in investable assets. “Brighton Jones started as a total balance sheet planner for high-net-worth clients and built additional services on that,” she said. “We plan for the things clients may need three, five or 10 years down the road, even if they do not know they will need these things yet. That is a heavy responsibility.”
Understanding what clients need before they even know they need it is the way to stay on the leading edge in the industry, Dillon said. The Brighton Jones team uses the Kano model, which looks at client satisfaction and functionality to find the “sweet spot” of capturing client need and engagement. It is a measurement method developed in Japan by educator and consultant Noriaki Cano to analyze client and customer activity. It can be used in all types of industries.
If advisors followed Brighton Jones’s lead, they would create a road map for engaging clients, which includes evaluating and exploring their needs, creating a structure for the implementation of the clients’ plans, and planning the launch, Dillon said. Advisory firms will need to add more “life services” for clients in order to meet their growing needs, she added.
For instance, her firm provides education on such things as how to plan for the care of aging or ill parents, how to evaluate real estate in a particular region or how to use community resources to improve the life, as well as the portfolio, of a client. “When a firm can deliver added services in a timely manner, it is a differentiator for the firm,” she said.
In order to gain insight into client needs, Brighton Jones has created an innovation panel, made up of firm clients, who meet every other month to talk about their “pain points.” Dillon said the firm wants to know what things are bothering them and what they would like to see the firm provide. The panel even helps determine how and what the firm should charge for these types of services.
“I don’t know that a smaller firm could provide these services because of the cost, although they might be able to outsource some of it,” Dillon speculated.