The Virtual Advisor: How to Use Digital Tools to Better Serve Your Clients

In a world where everyone lives on their digital devices, offering virtual services has become not only the norm but an expectation, even in traditionally high-touch industries like financial services. However, executing digital incorporation in our industry requires balancing the client convenience of virtual interactions without losing the personal touch clients expect.

The key to striking an equilibrium is making sure the client experience ultimately comes first, with a secondary goal of using the right digital tools to make the relationship more efficient for both the client and advisor.

A Client-First Experience with Virtual Meetings

With lives that are busier and more demanding than ever before, convenience is paramount to a successful client relationship. We have seen virtual meetings work for schools, businesses, and services of all kinds, and incorporating the option to have virtual meetings is a key feature of a client-first approach.

This digital option eliminates the need for clients to take time out of their day to travel, while still providing a face-to-face experience. Of course, there will still be clients who prefer on-site meetings, and you should explore each client’s preferences to ensure they will work with your business model.

This digital integration can also help immensely with client retention and business growth. If a client needs to relocate, advisors can continue to provide services by hosting meetings virtually.

In addition, advisors are no longer limited by location when it comes to taking on new business.

This can be especially beneficial in the case of succession planning, allowing advisors to seamlessly transition regardless of where a successor resides.

Thoughtful Integration of Artificial Intelligence

The goal of integrating digital tools is to provide a better client experience at a lower cost and personnel output. While technology is normally associated with a less personal experience, there are ways to integrate it to make customer relationships even more personal.

By using AI to carry out back-office tasks, financial professionals can create more time to actually serve their clients. One great example of this is AI’s ability to assist with routine customer interactions, like scheduling and administrative questions.

If used correctly, AI can improve the overall client experience by responding almost immediately to inquiries and effectively reduce a financial professional’s overhead. This creates more time to spend advising clients, building relationships, and providing a white-glove experience.

In addition to giving time back to advisors, AI tools can also facilitate a deeper dive into a client’s history and current needs, helping advisors be more proactive with future plans. New AI tools can help financial professionals better anticipate the needs of clients, and provide more thorough, personalized planning services.

Peace of Mind with Cybersecurity

Trust is a significant facet of the advisor/client relationship. Financial professionals are not only entrusted with managing their clients’ money and providing financial advice, but they are also tasked with safeguarding a great deal of the client’s personal information from malicious actors.

In our increasingly virtual world, investments in cybersecurity technology are a necessity, and should be viewed as a direct investment into the relationships financial professionals have with their clients. This inherently client-focused investment reflects an advisor’s commitment to serving their clients effectively, safely, and securely.

Financial professionals can also differentiate their services by providing cybersecurity training and guidance to their clients to protect them from fraud.

Digital Integration

The focus of digital integration should be to drive associate engagement and financial professional satisfaction while discovering new ways to meet the needs of clients. At Cambridge, we use digital integration to support the personalization required by our diverse community of financial professionals.

This emphasis on flexibility is core to our service story, and we are actively making investments to leverage new technology in all aspects of what we do and the services we offer.

Cambridge does not force a “fixed” technology stack onto our advisor firms; instead, we support the flexibility needed to allow them to control their own business models and serve their clients according to their own strengths and style of operation. We have made choices to leverage and curate a technology stack that allows us to offer a customized experience on both the firm and individual level.

Digital integration is an always-evolving process, but we are rolling out solutions today that will advance the businesses of financial advisors for years to come.

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