5 best practices for automating guidance or advice within financial technologies

What if we told you that, as a legacy organization, you have all the data points you need (and more) to automate financial advice and create a memorable customer experience? Over the years, you have accumulated thousands of data touchpoints that you may not even be aware of. Your client portal could be doing so much more than storing documents.

Whether you’re a traditional bank, financial advisor, or lender, understanding the key user experience (UX) conventions that automate guidance will create a better experience for your end customers and could contribute to higher ROI for your organization. 

As you look to reassess your automated guidance processes, keep these best practices in mind. 

1. Define the role of your human advisor or financial professional

With rapid advancements in AI, automated guidance in the financial services space is only getting better. As a legacy wealth management enterprise, you may feel out of the loop, especially because you’re used to bona fide human beings supporting your end customer. However, if you’re starting to suspect automated financial technologies could improve your customer experience (CX), follow that hunch.

The advent of ChatGPT and other language learning models (LLMs) means many industries, including financial services, are using AI not necessarily to replace humans, but to augment their work. So first things first: are you trying to automate your whole processes or simply make your employees’ jobs easier? 

Taking the middle ground is wise. In fact, many customers won’t completely trust or even understand the advice without an advisor in the middle. You can use automated features to collect data and provide high-level advice, but it’s up to your human advisors to provide additional insight, advice, and overall value to your end customer.

2. Have a complete view of your customer journey

Understanding how, when, and where someone will want to engage with your advising service is vital if you want to provide real value. Mapping your customer journey will help you understand how best to reach your customers at the best time.

Knowing which third parties may be involved in the experience is also critical to your customer journey map and design solution. Usually, partners make financial decisions together when it comes to investment planning. For example, one partner may gather the information required to create a retirement plan, while the other actually fills out the application. You need to create a service that can be completed in stages and shared with trusted parties. 

3. Create an engaging, intuitive user interface (UI)

Creating a world-class user experience and user interface is table stakes. Customers expect your platform’s UI will be easy to use, informative, and pretty to look at. If you haven’t already, take a page from modern startups, whose digital products are visually inviting, intuitive, and highly interactive. 

One way to ensure you’re engaging your customers is to cut down on verbose or overly clinical content. Instead, replace or supplement that content with highly visual, interactive data. 

Another consideration: often the processes in wealth management require multiple steps. Users may need two or three visits to complete a task. When designing your solution, design with multiple visits in mind.

4. Develop personalized and timely guidance

Along with engaging, intuitive UI, your customers expect personalized experiences. Your guidance model should speak to their specific financial scenarios, with comprehensible next steps that empower them to take action. 

Knowing how to design a personalized virtual financial guidance model can be tricky, but start with what you do know. What does the real-world “advice experience” look like at your organization? Take loan applications, for example. For many customers, the hard part isn’t getting a loan per se; it’s managing their credit to make loan payments on time. 

Here’s another example. If a natural disaster hits a customer’s home, and their home insurance leaves them with $10,000 of out-of-pocket repairs, they don’t just need a loan to cover that cost. They need an advisor checking in with them, offering timely behavioral insight. A good feature might be something that shows the customer’s spending habits, or a notification that tells them when they go over budget. Armed with this insight, the customer is less likely to make hasty financial decisions. 

We know it’s a challenge to create that kind of timely content. However, this is another scenario where you can use AI tools to your advantage. These technologies can extract data from the internet for financial firms like yours to create content that’s more useful to customers.

5. Convey trust and transparency

You can’t provide a personalized, automated experience without customer data. However, customers are understandably cagey about sharing their personal financial information with unknown parties. The question that comes up repeatedly when we conduct user interviews around financial tools is: “What are you doing with my data?”

To assuage these completely legitimate concerns, you need to foster trust in your digital financial services product at every touchpoint in the experience. Create content that clearly explains what data will be stored and how it will be used. And of course, follow through on your promises to protect that data. As an example, web3 technologies like blockchain offer the potential for a more decentralized and secure internet that puts users in control of their data and privacy.

Show your math

We know from user testing that people don’t always trust investment guidance — even from robots. Particularly if the guidance conveys surprising or altogether unwelcome news (e.g., the customer won’t be able to retire early as planned, or inflation is hurting their investments), users are more likely to greet the advice with skepticism or outright denial.

That’s why it’s important for your automated tool to explain how it arrived at its conclusions. It needs to “show the math.” Transparent math can go a long way in preparing your customers for a variety of financial outcomes, while also instilling trust in the product.

Partner with a CX consultancy

As a CX consultancy with 18 years experience, O3 knows the finer points of creating digital experiences in the financial sector. For us, the customer’s needs are always front and center. We can leverage customer data to create intuitive financial guidance tools and adjacent product experiences in the future. Ready to talk? So are we.