Beyond the Tech: Crafting Trust in the Digital Age of Finance
Discover how a culture of hospitality and personalized engagement drives profitability and customer loyalty in fintech
In the realm of modern business, where technological prowess is a baseline rather than a distinctive edge, the Optifino belief is that adopting a hospitality-first approach sets a fintech company apart. More banks are shuttering their robo-advisor services and many life insurance agents have been resistant to the tech-only onslaught, so any tech solution must empower agents and advisors to create additive value to their services. While the number of consumers that prefer to buy life insurance in person dropped from 64% in 2011 to just 29% in 2023 (LIMRA), and with 42% saying they are somewhat or not at all knowledgeable about life insurance, consumers are aware of their lack of knowledge and know they need human help. A common saying in the insurance industry is that "life insurance is sold, not bought", but we like to go further and say “relationships are bred, not built”. In other words, they do not form because one person has a product solution that they are pitching to a potential client, but because both people contribute and collaborate. Client relationships are a collaborative process, and hospitality—not just expertise—creates the conditions for collaboration and trust.
“When you create a hospitality-first culture, everything about your business improves—whether that means finding and retaining great talent, turning customers into raving fans, or increasing your profitability”
–Will Guidara, Unreasonable Hospitality
Embrace Vulnerability: The Gateway to Trust
In an era marked by increasing distrust and skepticism, leading with vulnerability emerges as a powerful tool to bridge the gap between clients and businesses. The amount of people who trust their neighbor goes down every generation. The amount of others who people can trust with a personal secret has gone from three to zero on average. Predatory digital financial influencers—and don’t get us started on crypto scams—have hurt the ability for people to trust the financial advice they read. It is more difficult to connect with the people we want to help with most. When we speak with potential clients, instead of making sweeping promises, we ensure we present all the upsides and watch outs of any policy decision told through the lens of our own experiences and learnings.
What is the best way to build rapport with the people you want to get to know? Tell them about your own experiences, your problems and your learnings. Sharing personal experiences and learning humanizes the interaction, fostering a sense of empathy and understanding. This approach not only helps in breaking down barriers of skepticism but also in building a foundation of trust and rapport. Agents can share personal stories or experiences related to life insurance, such as how having a policy provides security during unexpected events in their own life or a client's life. This vulnerability helps in creating a relatable connection, making clients more open to discussions about their own needs.
Simplify to Clarify: The Art of Goals Discovery
One of the most important messages to convey to potential clients is that life insurance portfolios must be designed in alignment with their financial goals—otherwise they risk actually damaging their ability to accomplish them. Immediately trying to explain the spectrum of policy options confuses potential clients when they don’t understand the benefits, and tradeoffs, that different life insurance policies can unlock. The life insurance industry is convoluted and opaque, so before explaining each policy type and risking them losing interest, understanding potential client goals to contextualize the benefits against their desired outcomes creates more attentiveness. If you can teach them something about the result and transformation they desire, before you make the offer, the likelihood of them accepting the offer increases exponentially.
The goals discovery process begins with getting the client to reveal the motivations impacting the decisions they make and the roadmap they are hoping to follow. Financial goals are important to integrate, but it’s more important to understand how their larger dreams and aspirations impact their financial goals. As Blake Eastman, founder of The Nonverbal Group points out, you want to approach these types of conversations with an understanding of how you would write your client’s victory speech. In the recent book by David Brooks, How to Know a Person, he emphasizes the idea of asking directional questions that pinpoint desired outcomes. We don’t need to get into their life stories, but it’s helpful to contextualize how they think about the big moments. We want to understand the pivotal moments in their life to date, what life stage they are currently in, and what they are working towards. For example, a few questions to uncover motivations and financial goals might be:
“What are the turning points of your life so far?”
“If this five years is a chapter in your life, what’s the chapter about?”
“If we met five or ten years from now, what would we be celebrating?”
One simple rule of thumb is to ask more questions than you answer. Do not jump into trying to “productsplain”, but the goal is to establish the foundation of the relationship. Blake Eastman finds that conflict arises when two different people have different understandings of what comprises a relationship. In this first stage, we ask the questions that allow them to share themselves so we can better understand the depth of support they expect from our client-agent relationship. Without investing the time and energy into goal discovery, the rest of the process will be much less effective and our job made much more difficult. There is also a larger flywheel effect that this process feeds where the more goals and life stages we come to understand, the more quickly and thoroughly we can support clients with similar goals in a similar life stage.
Prioritize Depth Over Breadth: The Power of Focused Conversations
One way to clarify and understand the client is by avoiding interrupting and asking too many questions. Instead of overwhelming clients with all possible options, focus on patiently understanding their specific needs and concerns through thoughtful questions. In fact, in many Asian countries, it is considered polite to pause for a few seconds before answering a question to show that you have reflected upon the question and your response. While waiting so long in the USA might come across as awkward, we find the principle of waiting a pause before answering creates trust with potential clients. Studies of silence in negotiation—measuring the amount of silence and outcomes that are mutually cooperative—found that silence and success is correlated. Embracing the quiet moments is proven to help you arrive at an agreement that benefits all sides.
Quality conversations do not come from asking every question, but asking the right ones. Asking the right questions requires active listening and asking open ended questions that inspire the client to think out loud—even tangents uncover priorities that may not have otherwise surfaced. Remember, less is more. As Triad Consulting emphasizes, a rich conversation about one or two questions will be more meaningful, and get more traction than surface discussion of many questions. Open-ended questions leave room for people to take the conversation in whatever direction seems most relevant to them, and follow up questions help you get under general labels and probe meaning. Closed questions like, “Don’t you agree?” elicit yes/no responses and close down conversation. Open questions are most useful prior to going into the platform while policy explanations and pointed questions are best when doing a live demo and walking them through the platform.
Potential Open Ended Questions
“What do you think about life insurance?”
“How do you see this budget working in your world?”
“How do you approach allocating your budget for your financial goals?
“Thoughts?”
Establish Consistent Communication: The Rhythm of Reliability
“The way to break through the wall of distrust is to keep showing up.” – David Brooks
Many clients take several calls and follow-ups to establish trust, and the most important aspect to building trust is consistency. Consistency in communication underscores reliability and commitment. A structured cadence of follow-ups, personalized emails, and thoughtful reminders demonstrates an ongoing interest in the client's well-being and progress. This reliability breeds trust and loyalty, transforming clients into enthusiastic advocates that creates word of mouth and drives new business. Balancing automated workflow communications with personalization is key to developing reliability. When a client sees the expertise of the team overtime through marketing emails that educate them on additional benefits of life insurance, then they can feel more empowered to make a decision without the need for persuasion.
Consistency also helps build memorability, and we rely on scientific studies on the importance of frequency on memory to build our communication cadence. Studies find that forgetting happens after each exposure, but it’s slower than before and therefore the gaps between exposures can be longer as time goes on. There is a delicate balance between sending too much to clients that they start to get annoyed with, and between being a helpful reminder to take the next step in a process that will change their life. Communications need to be a steady drip, that starts with more frequency and slowly becomes less so overtime as leads become cold. There is an art and science behind finding the right cadence, so ensuring there is measurement to optimize the process is imperative.
Building Success With Culture
“Fads fade and cycle, but the human desire to be taken care of never goes away.” –Will Guidara, Unreasonable Hospitality
The most important aspect of building a hospitality culture is that it’s not built overnight, and integrating a hospitality-first approach into your sales process will not result in immediate results. The Optifino team shares over 100 years of combined investment and life insurance experience, so we know firsthand the importance of building an individual experience and establishing a competitive yet fun sociable culture. As we enter the exponential age—where AI is pervasive and tech-empowerment is table stakes for any business—the way to differentiate is to be the most human, both internally in the workplace and externally with clients. As the great Maya Angelou said, people will forget what you said but they’ll never forget how you made them feel. Establishing a hospitality culture means going above and beyond in terms of how deeply you hope to connect with your clients, in addition to considering how you can help others on your team—because all of their success equates with yours.
If there is one mantra to take away from our approach it is to simply slow down. Selling life insurance does not mean pushing a product on anybody, but equipping them with the information to where they feel confident in making their own decision—even if you guided them there. Yes, we want to help as many people as possible and as soon as possible because of the opportunity cost of waiting, but we still need to help them at their speed. This does not mean moving slow, but taking the time to digest what we see and hear to create the most impactful, personalized recommendation. As Amy Herman explains in Visual Intelligence, “Details, patterns, and relationships take time to register. Nuances and new information can be missed if we rush past them.” We made our optimization engine fast so we could spend more time listening to your needs, ensuring the human leads the machine—rather than the machine leading the human.