Less effort. Less stress. Better outcomes.
People often don’t do things they know need to be done. We fail to act knowing that leaving tasks incomplete harms our wellness; financial, physical, mental and otherwise. People take action when they believe success is likely and have support along the way.
Advisors can instill the belief in clients that financial wellness is theirs to achieve, but advisors did not have a scalable way to provide the support clients need to take action.
Until now…
Knudge equips advisors with a system and process that supports clients in tracking and completing action items.
We built Knudge because we needed a better process for helping our clients take action. We were already spending a lot of time and energy nudging our clients to follow through on their action items – only often ineffectively.
Countless hours were spent digging through old emails to try to figure out what was actioned and what was still outstanding, we were leaving reminders for ourselves to follow up and remind our clients, and we were even losing sleep at night worrying that maybe they were letting something important fall through the cracks.
And we knew we weren’t alone. We spoke with other financial planners, financial coaches, accountants, attorneys, etc. and across the board, service oriented professionals were spending a lot of time following up with their clients only to have mixed results and lots of frustration.
There had to be a better way. Now, Knudge helps us stay organized and and simultaneously has increased the completion rate of actionable requests.
- Knudge allows advisors to have an easy and repeatable process for assigning action items to our clients.
- It sends timely reminders about those action items via multiple communication channels and according to our clients’ preferences.
- It gives our clients an easy way to communicate back if they have any questions or just to let us know when something is done.
- And importantly, it provides a place where we can check in and see across our client base where everything stands at any given point in time.
We’ve seen first hand the impact Knudge can have on advisors, and our clients. We’re no longer losing sleep at night wondering what important actions we may have forgotten to remind our clients to take. Our clients have embraced Knudge and tell us that they also feel more organized. Knowing that all of these issues we’ve discussed live in one place has lifted a weight. They appreciate the automated reminders and feel more empowered to implement the plan we’ve put together.
We’re excited to help advisors and other professionals who are committed to helping their clients take action. If we can help you do your work better, and in turn help your clients have better outcomes then that would be pretty cool.
— Shaun & Dave
As a small company we were looking for an efficient solution to follow up with our clients. When we found Knudge we knew this was exactly what we were looking for to keep us and our clients accountable on outstanding action items. Little did we know that our clients would be so responsive and follow through when consistently “nudged!”
Why Now?
There’s a seismic shift happening in the financial advice industry.
Financial advisors are providing a higher level of service and helping their client’s with every aspect of their financial lives, not just managing their investments.
A decade ago, Robo-advisors were supposed to disintermediate human financial advisors. That did not happen, but their impact was significant, if unexpected. The very things that humans do best – listen, empathize, encourage, and guide – became more valuable to clients. The core job of the advisor changed from managing investments to advising clients on the myriad of decisions that impact their long-term wellbeing. Clients are demanding a broader planning relationship and a partner in making sure things get done.
This shift has 3 fundamental impacts on the industry:
- Advisors are providing a more holistic approach to wealth management
- Providing this higher level of service compresses margins
- The flow of information between advisors and clients is much more dynamic
It used to be that advisors could serve their clients by sitting down with them every year for an update then making any necessary tweaks to the investment plan. Today, advisors are consulting on every aspect of their clients’ financial lives, including adjacent areas like estate and tax planning, healthcare, and successful aging. This holistic approach requires not only more of the advisor, but also of the client. This new dependency on the actions of clients means it falls on the advisor to hold their clients accountable for their end of the deal as well as their own.
Advisors are spending an average of 6 hours per week following up with clients, yet as little as 20% of client tasks are completed.
No company has tackled this problem until now because until recently, it has not been this acute.
Why clients often fail to take action
People often neglect to take action on the things that they know are in their best interest to implement. For some things, the task itself provokes anxiety (e.g. purchasing life insurance and reflecting on one’s own mortality). For most tasks, the reason is much more prosaic. People are creatures of habit and our daily routines reinforce those habits. When clients are asked to do something outside of an existing system (e.g. send a tax return to their advisor), there is nowhere to “put” it, so they procrastinate or simply forget.
What Knudge Does
Knudge provides advisors an easy and repeatable process for managing client action items and sends timely reminders to ensure their clients get stuff done. By automating and optimizing the follow up process, Knudge increases the likelihood that clients will take action. Knudge allows advisors to offer white-glove service at scale, developing deeper and longer relationships with more clients.