Financial advisers should engage more with online services or risk losing the growing number of clients who care less for personal relationships, Robert Glaesener has warned.
The chief executive of Talkwalker said intermediaries were increasingly getting caught between traditional customers who prefer face-to-face relationships and those conducting their business online.
But rather than embrace these changing habits, Mr Glaesener warned that not enough had been done to attract people who opt to evaluate providers and make decisions online.
He said: “Today’s intermediaries are caught between traditional customers who prefer a personal relationship and those who increasingly conduct their business relationships online.
“They evaluate their providers, make decisions and buy their products on the move, at the click of a button. These are today’s consumers of financial services, not tomorrow’s, and if intermediaries are going to ‘know their customers’, they have to take an interest in the fast-emerging social world that informs their decisions.”
According to Mr Glaesener, engaging with social media can be achieved by using social analytics, which are tools that enable users to see who visited the website and how they arrived.
Describing tools like Google analytics as ideal platforms to “probe” the social world, he urged advisers to get involved in order to retain and attract new clients.
These tools, he said, can help advisers build a “solid understanding” of customers, rather than “second guessing” their thoughts and preferences.
He added: “They monitor their conversations and posts, attitudes and opinions.
They benchmark your social media performance and competitor activity and tell you what is being said about your company or your sector.
“They enable companies to build services around the customer, instead of building products in the hope of finding customers.”
Mr Glaesener also stressed the importance of how websites are presented, and recommended producing a positive stream of quality content, imagery and opinion.
Differentiating a website from competitors, he said, can make a massive difference in attracting more visitors, as can the use of graphs and images, which he said were “more remarkable than plain text”.
Adviser view
Chris Daems, director of London-based Principal Financial Solutions, said: “There is genuine validity to that argument. IFAs should be adapting their approach to the way many of us now communicate. I believe we will see a lot more financial planning propositions being driven by the web, as technology can automate and systemise. What these opportunities could generate is massively exciting. But there are clients who will always prefer face-to-face advice.
