How to improve your Client Lifecycle with CTT Legacy Portal

The terms ‘Client Journey’ and ‘Client Lifecycle’ are used a lot in business strategies and marketing plans, often interchangeably; the fact is that although they are closely linked, they are two very different ways of measure and refining your clients’ experience.

What’s the difference between Client Journey and Client Lifecycle?

Client Lifecycle is the overarching term for your client’s complete, ongoing relationship with your business. There are several stages in the Client Lifecycle, starting with Awareness – when a prospective client first becomes aware of your business and services – all the way through to Advocacy, when the client’s positive experience with you leads to them recommend your services to others.

The term ‘Client Journey’ on the other hand refers to specific moments or phases within the Client Lifecycle. While a Client Lifecycle might last months or – hopefully – years, a Client Journey is their end-to-end experience of a single event, which can be either positive or negative.

The outcomes of these events directly impact the Lifecycle of your client: Good experiences retain clients and help sustain their Lifecycle; poor experiences push them away and can even bring their Lifecycle to an end.

Examples of Client Journeys could be their first interaction with your website, completing a digital Fact Find, or emailing you with questions about their estate planning options. Usually, journeys begin when the client has a specific goal in mind.

Your ability to help them meet this goal and bring their journey to a swift, satisfying conclusion ensures a positive client experience, resulting in a happy, long-term client who can’t recommend your services enough.

Both Client Lifecycle and Client Journey are important ways of measuring success and improving your services, but while the Client Journey focuses on individual touchpoints, effective Lifecycle Management is what builds lasting, long-term client relationships.

Effective Lifecycle Management with CTT Legacy Portal

There are five stages within the Client Lifecycle. These are:

• Awareness – becoming aware of your business, product, or service
• Consideration – weighing up its pros and cons vs your competition
• Conversion – making the decision to commit or make a purchase
• Retention – enjoying the benefits of being an existing client
• Advocacy – recommending your business, product, or service to others

CTT Legacy Portal empowers you to manage and enhance every stage of your Client Lifecycle, helping you derive more value from each and every client relationship.

Awareness

Digital services are becoming increasingly more popular and more common. Where once you’d have to go into a bank to transfer funds or the Post Office to mail a parcel, digital service providers have made it the norm to action all these things using smart devices; so much so, people have come to expect it!

Estate planning, however, is one professional service that’s been slow to catch on. While other providers have tapped into the ease and convenience of digital tools, many estate planners are still shuffling piles of paperwork around and waiting on Royal Mail to get things done.

This is where CTT Legacy Software gives you the edge over the competition and an opportunity to stand out. Generate awareness of your fast, forward-thinking services that put the client at the heart of the estate planning process.

The Legacy Portal app attracts prospects with a professional, digital-first experience that smooths the entire estate planning journey, making it easy to understand and straightforward to get started.

Give your prospective clients access to information that heightens their awareness of a need for estate planning and encourages them to make first contact through the Legacy Portal app. Position your estate planning services as current, approachable, and responsive to the needs of today’s busy client – the message is: “a Will is essential but it needn’t be a chore”.

Consideration

The Consideration stage of the Client Lifecycle is all about them weighing up the pros and cons of your service or products and comparing them with those offered by similar providers before making a decision.

To get prospective clients through this phase of the Lifecycle (one of the trickiest phases and often where prospects are lost), you need to address any obstacles that are holding them back. Not only that, but you must also be faster and more effective at addressing them than your rivals if you are to secure a prospect’s business.

Obstacles for your clients at this stage could be things like: ‘I’m not sure I really need estate planning’; ‘this looks too expensive for me’; ‘I haven’t got time to do is right now’; ‘There’s too much information to take in’.

One of the best ways to overcome obstacles at this stage of the Client Lifecycle is by being proactive; satisfy their need or resolve their uncertainty before it has time to take root and become an issue. In doing this, you put your prospective client at ease while also gaining their trust.

Legacy Portal supports this approach by helping you to understand each client’s needs early on. The digital Fact Find allows them to easily share information about their assets, family dynamics, and circumstances so you can identify the most suitable estate planning products to fulfil their specific needs, even before your first client meeting.

The app is simple to use on any digital device, taking prospects through each step of the Fact Find with clear explanations and instructions. Designed with convenience in mind, it even allows users to save their progress and come back to it later, so clients can complete their information at their own pace from wherever suits them best.

Conversion

Increasingly we’re seeing evidence that when prospective clients feel informed and confident in their estate planning choices, they are more inclined to place orders – not just for basic wills, but more complex estate planning products too.

This is largely because having an understanding how estate planning works, and the means to take control of their planning through Legacy Portal, empowers clients to make bolder decisions about asset protection.

The more you educate your prospects about their planning options and how to achieve the outcomes they want for their estate and beneficiaries, the easier it is to convert them into confident, committed clients.

With CTT Legacy Portal, all this work is done for you. Once the clients has completed their Fact Find, the Legacy Software enables you to create a bespoke Recommendation Report and share it with your client via the app.

The Report details all the best planning products for them, based on the information supplied, and outlines these as personalised animations that are both informative and engaging. The videos can be viewed as many times as the client needs, each one tailored to show the effects of various planning solutions on their estate and how they support the client’s wishes for their legacy.

Armed with his information, clients feel ready to commit – or able to ask more informed questions that help deepen their understanding of your products and make clear choices about the planning products they want to purchase.

Retention

Once a client has purchased planning with you, how do you get them to come back for more services? This is the Retention stage of your client’s Lifecycle; it’s about giving your clients value and incentive to stay with you, so they continue to use your services – and eventually become Advocates who recommend you to their friends and family.

It’s easy to see how you might apply a retention strategy to a retail business or restaurant, for example. People use these places frequently and will often have their favourite outlets where they like to shop and eat, returning again and again to enjoy their service and offering.

With estate planning, however, there is a common misconception that it’s a one-off purchase – making a will is something you only ever have to do once and then that’s it: no need to engage with your estate planner ever again. Needless to say, as an adviser, this makes client retention a challenge!

With Legacy Portal it’s easy to maintain engagement with your clients and build lasting relationships through consistent digital communication.

You don’t have to wait for these opportunities to present themselves either. Legacy Estate Planning Software, allows you to search your existing will bank and filter for clients whose planning may need review or those who are missing LPAs. Use this information to build your own Retention campaigns, sending targeted reminders to your clients through the portal, inviting them to re-engage with your services and enjoy the benefits!

A good example of this is the coming changes in BR and AR that could impact clients with agricultural and business assets.

Through thoughtful, client-focused contact, Legacy Portal becomes an invaluable retention tool that unlocks hidden value in your will bank.

Advocacy

The final stage of your client’s Lifecycle is Advocacy. This is when all the time and nurturing you’ve investing in caring for a client really starts to pay off. No marketing in the world is as powerful as a genuine word-of-mouth referral from someone you trust. When your happy clients start recommending you to their friends and family, you know you’re onto a good thing!

Legacy’s white labelling allows you to firmly stamp your mark on all digital documents and correspondence relating to your clients’ journeys. When each and every journey is underlined with your company name and branding, this becomes a mark of excellence that clients trust and are confident to recommend to their loved ones.

With Legacy, you build client assurance through the entire digital journey; customers feel like all their needs are being met before, during, and after their planning, sustaining the Lifecycle of your clients and generating revenue long into the future.