It’s Saturday night. You try out the hottest new dumpling restaurant on King St, and it’s a revelation.
The pan-fried pork buns are simultaneously crispy and juicy, the xiao long baos are bursting with mouth-watering umami, and the service (for a dumpling joint at least) is impeccable – you actually get everything you ordered. You can’t wait to go back, and have been singing praises to all your followers on TikTok.
Fast forward to your second visit a week later, and it’s … not the same. It’s stressfully crowded – your TikTok vid really got out there – and they had to quickly cobble together a table out of corflute and milk crates right outside the toilets just to squeeze you in.
The pan-fried pork buns are now simultaneously mealy and dry, and the xiao long baos are mouth-scaldingly bland and uninspired. And the service - well, you’d be happy if you got out of there in one piece. It’s a letdown. Not a huge one, but enough to leave a bad taste in your mouth (pun intended).
Would you go back again? Probably not.
As consumers, we all expect consistency, regardless of whether you’re running a dumpling joint or an advice practice. It doesn’t matter how good a first impression you make; a perceived drop in standard is all it takes to spoil all that hard-earned goodwill.
When it comes to ensuring a consistent and exceptional client experience in your Xplan kitchen, templates are your friend. If the mere mention of the word “template” makes you recoil with disgust, you may be harbouring a deep-rooted belief that templating equals cookie-cutter.
Well, I can assure you that is not necessarily the case; with the right approach and good coding, you can create highly repeatable templates that also feel personalised to your client.
Merge templates and Wizards
Are you writing out your letters of engagement on Word? What about your ongoing fee renewals or fixed term agreements?
You should review all your standard letters/agreements and see if these can be coded as Xplan merge docs. If you’re new to coding, this Learning centre module is a great place to start.
For more complex documents which require additional input from the user, you may need Wizards to make it happen (check with your site administrator to see if this is allowed).
Aside from the time savings, using merge docs reduces embarrassing mistakes like leaving another client’s name in. (Ouch!)
Client Portal
If you’re not familiar with Client Portal, definitely look into it if you want to spice up your client experience. As the name suggests, it’s a branded portal where your clients can log in, securely send and receive messages (including attachments), view their financial details, and complete their fact find online – all of which feeds right into Xplan, removing the need for manual handling on your side.
The following touch points offer opportunities for you to win over your clients:
- Issuing client logins: these email templates are your clients’ first impression of Client Portal, so make sure to give it a bit of zing! (You’ll need your site administrator’s help if you don’t run your own site.)
- Secure message: you can use note templates for sending more standard messages to your clients, e.g. welcome message, appointment confirmations/reminders, etc.
Advice templates (SOAs, ROAs, fact find)
While this is ostensibly a merge template, the sheer complexity of advice templates (usually involving a wizard and the ability to pull modelling data from various Xplan tools) means that this deserves a special mention.
Your Xplan site may already have an advice template solution, which is great.
If not, you might be writing SOAs off a saved Word template, and manually copy-and-pasting data from Xplan modelling tools (or spreadsheets) into your template. This is obviously a very time-consuming process, and not great for client experience since it’s taking longer for you to present your advice. And the manual handling increases the likelihood of errors.
Also, how do you ensure that any compliance updates are being included into the documents?
You have the following options:
Code your own
This is typically more feasible for larger outfits (as opposed to a one-adviser practice). You can engage our projects team to scope out and build your own templates. The benefits you get from a bespoke and well-constructed wizard and template that fits your specific business processes far outweigh the initial outlay and can save you a lot of time and money in the long run.
Be mindful that you will need to dedicate internal resources to the project during the build and testing. Maintenance of the templates going forward is a key consideration; legislation changes, code updates to accommodate new (and obsolete) features and there may be changes to strategy text.
Unless you plan on making these updates yourself, all of these will need to be re-scoped and quoted. This is the recommended approach if you have very specific requirements.
Third party
There are a number of third party providers with their own templates and support services.
Xplan Advice Toolkit
This is Iress’s off-the-shelf advice template solution which allows styling and branding to make it look like your own. While it’s not designed as a customisable template, it has everything you need in an SOA or ROA, and the process of generating an SOA is simple and intuitive.
Workflows
Think of workflows as the maître d' of your restaurant; they supervise the wait staff to ensure that everyone who walks through the doors to your fine establishment gets a fantastic welcome and has a great experience.
In the same way, workflows ensure that the right people work on the right things, at the right time, and that all of your compliance obligations are met.
Imagine you have a new prospect query come in, and you have a workflow that holds the hand of your admin staff and advisers through the whole process. It automatically sends clients personalised emails or notifications when needed. It automatically opens notes for when an adviser needs to detail a meeting. It automatically captures all the important notes, documents, scenarios and modelling relating to your advice.
Workflows can be super powerful if you leverage all the various built-in automation features; which is why you should invest the time to design and build it.
But where to start?
If you’re new to workflows, I would first brush up on tasks, threads and cases in Learning Centre. Once you’ve gotten a handle on that, make sure to fire up the Workflow Starter Kit, a great interactive learning module which helps you consolidate your learning.
Also, you can add some zest to your workflows through Scheduler, which allows you to schedule works to be done for a list of clients.
What else?
If you see it in Xplan, there’s probably a template for it – Opportunity, Case, Email, Task, Diary, Note, Campaign, you name it. Browse through our handy resources on Community and Learning Centre to make sure you’re across how to create these templates.
As you can see, there’re quite a lot of ingredients in the Xplan recipe book for you to play around with, but I hope this helps you see what’s possible when it comes to whipping up the ultimate client experience.
Xplan Expert
