Communication - from face time to FaceTime
#communicationtools #humancomnections #strategy #technology #changingtimes
August 2020
I work in one of the most high-touch businesses. Traditionally this role was all about face time, face time with the clients and their families (and possibly businesses partners) and face time with other professionals who could supply ideas and expertise to further our clients’ family, business and non-profit interests. I am the professional confidante and superconnector.
While the nature and the goal of managing client relationships haven’t changed a bit, how we interact with clients is a work in progress.
Two decades ago, I would call a client at his office to tell him we would be sending documents to him by fax. If the client was out I would leave a message with his secretary to request a return call. The client might call from his cell phone or from his landline phone. The signed documents would be returned by fax and the original by messenger, post or courier. Then cell phones and email gradually took over and fax was phased out. The rise of BlackBerry brought email and instant messaging to the forefront of business interaction. Email was now pushed to clients’ devices and replies were much faster and much shorter. BlackBerry Messenger was the first messaging tool for casual client conversations such as settings up calls and meetings as well as requesting information. Then came the long reign of iPhones which, coupled with the advent of software like WhatsApp and WeChat, completely changed our communication pattern. I don’t receive that many calls on FaceTime but clients have really grown accustomed to in-app calls via WhatsApp and WeChat. In 2018 a colleague in the US told me they didn’t download WhatsApp just so that clients couldn’t contact them that way! Because it wasn’t kosher.
I made up my mind to download WhatsApp and WeChat in 2013. I resisted for years thinking I needed to ward off junk mail that plagued my email accounts since College days. That year 2 incidents prompted me to take the plunge and join the herd. In March 2013 returning from business trip in Beijing, I noticed the senior citizen sitting next to me, a hongkong real estate tycoon, was on the phone with his office and messaging on WhatsApp at the same time, while we languished in purgatory on the tarmac. How efficient, I thought. Two months later, a client invited me and my team to meet his family. A member of the “younger generation” complained that she could never get hold of her mum because the matriarch wasn’t on WhatsApp. My colleagues were good enough to keep a straight face but bad enough to tease me for years. Social expectation has really changed- even octogenarian matrons were supposed to be reachable on WhatsApp!
The advent of WeChat brought us much closer to clients in mainland China. They are much more tech savvy and are much more receptive to embracing new applications in every aspect of life. These informal channels were practical tools and quickly became the preferred method of communication. Naturally we would only use the recorded lines to make recommendations and clients still had to call our office taped lines to place orders. As the use of chat applications grew, group chats morphed from social tools to admin tools to business tools. Group chats were set up for coordinating events (“working lunch tomorrow”), broadcasting general reminders (“CEO townhall at 5pm”) requesting assistance (“please courier 3 copies to my hotel”) and sharing jokes. Gradually group chats grew to a point where one capital markets lawyer complained that you wouldn’t know most of the people in the group. Many firms have strict restrictions on chat groups as a knee jerk reaction to incidents. Some have blanket ban on internal communications via all non-company software.
I often joke that while clients continue to pursue their 21st Century tech-enabled conveniences, we (as an industry, not just me personally!) happily remain in the Jurassic Park of recorded land lines and email, eventually losing market share to roboadvisors. So when I heard the digital team was finally planning a kosher WeChat service for client communication, I volunteered to work with them on the project specs.
I already expected some WeChat features, such as audio recordings, would have to be disabled. So I tried to lobby the use of photo attachments as a consolation prize since we often send and receive scanned documents and visual attachments to clients via company email anyway. If this was to be a tool for the benefit of the client I would start with what they were already doing in person and via their preferred channels. I also hoped this convenience would allow clients to send us photos of what competition offered. Throughout my career clients have supplied most (if not all) of the intel on what other banks offered and we couldn’t afford to make that an obstacle race. Most of these suggestions were later rejected by Compliance but I comforted my Digital team colleagues with the hope that we would be able to phase in other features after collecting client feedback. As long as the service infrastructure met with regulatory approval we could always build on it. Then when the time came to formally introduce the service to clients I went through the draft and helped them rewrite the Chinese version. Finally I rallied the China team bankers to promote the service among their clients. If the service had a low penetration rate among China clients, what chances does it have in other markets? In order to get the resources to improve or add on to this communication platform, we would need client feedback and user data to support the initiative.
In typical banking fashion, 2 full time dedicated staff from Compliance were deployed to manually copy and paste the conversations onto a central database. That was in 2018. Fast forward to mid August 2020 in a zoom webinar on Regtech, this was brought up in passing by an external party as an example of logistics challenge. She shared the horror story of a corporate client’s employing 2 full time compliance workers to copy and paste WeChat conversations onto excel worksheets. What caught me most by surprise is that in 2 years the demand for this service hasn’t expanded enough to justify more manpower and the bank hasn’t managed to streamline or automate the process. This is the state of technology in banking. No wonder some academics warn that for all the exploitation workers had to endure in the last century, irrelevance could be the nightmare of the future workers.
We are social animals and we will keep looking for easier and smoother ways to connect with one another. This will forever be a work in progress. But some sectors might have to choose between empowerment and extinction.