Gathering Client Facts
ProblemS
We need to build an application to assist the representatives in quickly gathering information to build a financial plan, while not harming their relationship-building or distracting them.
Northwestern Mutual’s financial representatives need to build rapport with a client and gather information while meeting in person.
Solution
Build an application that uses extremely concise language, enabling maximum comprehension at a glance. Also, facilitate rapid information capturing, enable the representative to keep a conversation going, and solidify rapport.
Process
After initial kickoff meetings for this project, I knew that I’d need to be as precise and concise as possible. The representatives don’t have time to read and would need to understand what they were looking at, at a glance.
However, upon further discussion with some of our representatives, I realize just how important it is to ask questions in the right way. This enables the conversation to continue naturally while learning more about a client and build an accurate financial plan. Understanding this, I then had a unique idea that I felt could be very valuable and useful to the representatives.
Our designers wanted to use cards to capture specific goals. For example, a card for buying a home would have fields relating to that. I wanted to use the notes text field for a special type of placeholder text. Normally placeholder text would give hints about what type of information should be entered into a specific field. For these note fields, I recommended putting a phrase that the representative can read, out loud to the client, to get the information they need and sound natural in the process. For the buy a home example:
”What does a dream home look like?”
I worked with some of our top advisors to create one of these for each goal card, in addition to keeping field content short and scannable.
Once the application was built and tested, it was met with resounding success. Financial representatives were able to capture information and not interrupt the flow of their conversations. The content I’d written for the cards was particularly well received as it meant representatives no longer needed to think about how they were going to word something to capture that particular information. It had an additional result of semi-standardizing the language representatives use with clients - something that had been attempted in the past. Since this type of placeholder text was successfully received, my colleagues have adopted it for use in similarly situated applications.