How can advisers and clients have a better financial advice review experience?

In partnership with one of Australia’s leading providers of financial advice software, we dove deep into understanding the process and experience of carrying out financial advice reviews. Sometimes treated as little more than a mandatory checkpoint, reviews are actually a key time to align the expectations of clients and the capabilities of advisers.

With help from our client, we organised a dozen hour-long one-on-one deep interviews with advisers and their staff who used the software to support the giving of financial advice. Using a semi-structured interview format, we talked through the end-to-end review experience in the context of a specific review customer, uncovering a series of insights about what goes into each and every review, and the emotional highs and lows.

Key insights, alongside existing benefits, gaps, and challenges, were organised in a huge affinity map, then incorporated into a hand-drawn, end-to-end journey storyboard of the existing advice review experience.

The key outcome was identifying how changes to the organisation’s software could transform the entire review experience. Improvements were prioritised, depending on their complexity to implement and the effect they would have. With only a limited budget to design a new experience, we used lightweight text-based future vignettes to prototype and communicate what a future review could look and feel like to advisers, staff and their customers.

The company’s Product Team were thrilled with the research and service design outputs, referring to them as “absolute gold when it comes to knowing what to do next and building a solid business case.” We’re looking forward to being part of future projects as the team iterates towards an exciting, new future.