Advisor Dashboard ReDesign
Project Overview
As product manager for Communicatons Central, a communication dashboard designed to reduce email volume for financial advisors, I was charged with driving adoption. I developed a comprehensive communications and education plan. While the idea was well-received and we had some enthusiastic adopters, only 12% of the target audience were active users of the system 15 months after launch.
My team and I used mixed-methods research and an agile development
methodology to incrementally improve Communications
Central, ultimately using it’s content management capabilities to
create a personalized newsletter that better met the advisors’ expectations and reduced email volume by 30%.
Background
Communications Central was created to address ongoing financial advisor complaints about email volume. An internal study indicated that the average advisor received approximately 2,000 emails per month, including email from clients, third-party investment providers, internal business partners, and branch offices. The development team decided to focus their attention on internal corporate emails as the largest source of content and selected a communications dashboard as the solution. The idea was for advisors go into the dashboard and select whether they wanted to receive communications on various topics, called
subscriptions, via email to their Outlook Inbox, view it directly on the communications dashboard, or receive both.
The development team then worked with content creators to categorize the email into seven groups: Global Wealth & Investment Management Chief Investment Office Communications, Client Solutions, Protecting Your Practice, For Your Practice, Business Updates, Operational Updates, and Employee Resources. Under these main categories there more than 200 subscriptions that narrowed the content further.
Adoption
While demonstrations of Communications Central were well-recieved, fifteen months after the launch of Communications Central only 12% of financial advisors were active users. Another 3% had used it to unsubscribe from communications they no longer wanted. Adoption was highest with advisors under age 35 and the team hypothesized that younger users who were more familiar with the Internet and social media had less of an experience gap than their older counterparts. We conducted a survey test our hypothesis and better understand the low adoption rate.
Advisors Told Us:
Following the survey, I realized that advisors weren’t just telling us that they received too many communications, but the communications they were receiving were hard to understand.
Iterative Testing & Agile Development
Over the next two years my team and began to iteratively improve the communications dashboard in a number of ways. We began with revising the communications categories so that they better matched advisor expectations. At the same time, we created an information architecture, content standards and style guide. After testing these concepts through focus groups and A/B testing, we implemented to new standards and created a training program for the more than 200 content creators sending communications to Merrill Lynch advisors and estabilished an editorial review board to ensure compliance. The next step in the process was to create a weekly newsletter to consolidate communications that were for information only. My role in the project culminated with the development of an automated, personalized, newsletter containing links targed to individual advisors.
Conclusion
This newsletter was in beta testing in the spring of 2018. Communications requiring advisors to contact clients or take another action appear in the yellow “Attention” box near the top of the email (see image at right). Links to essential resources and timely communications were also “above the fold.” More than 90% of our beta test group felt the daily newsletter allowed them to manage their work more effectively and analytics showed a 30% reduction in email volume.
