Advisors should get used to conducting virtual meetings, because they’re unlikely to go away, according to Ken Haman, managing director of the AB Advisor Institute.

While virtual meetings have been possible for years, they were slow to catch on until the pandemic forced advisors to work from home and eliminated the possibility of meeting with their clients face to face. Now, as the world begins to reopen, the financial industry can’t afford to assume that things will return completely to normal, said Haman.

“As the size of screens and image quality increases, I think you’ll continue to see substantial adoption of virtual meetings,” he said in an interview with Financial Advisor. “Some clients will strongly prefer it and the quality of what the advisor can do in a virtual meeting for them, but I do think that some face-to-face meetings will continue to be a part of the business. Humans are humans, our behaviors are consistent over time. We adapt in the short term, but maintain consistent patterns in the long term.”

Forced to use the technology, advisors and clients are now both familiar and comfortable with virtual meetings, said Haman, adding that he was “surprised by how adaptive everybody was and impressed with how relationship-focused advisors were.”

Many advisors and clients will return to face-to-face meetings and interactions, wrote Haman in “Mastering The Virtual Practice: Why Your Clients Will Prefer Virtual Meetings,” a blog post published on June 5. But the concept of annual, semi-annual or quarterly face-to-face meetings between advisors and clients was already waning before the outbreak, he  noted. Advisors and clients both are probably less enthusiastic about restarting meetings than they are returning to dinner events, concerts and parties.

Haman gave a number of reasons whhy virtual meetings are likely a permanent part of doing business for advisors. For one thing, they’re more efficient for clients and advisors, easy to set up and they don’t require either party to travel in order to meet, which makes scheduling a meeting much easier.

But clients and prospects will also get more control over access to the advisor or salesperson, the duration of the meeting, and the focus of the presentation. Clients can decide when they’re available to work with advisors, instead of advisors proposing a time during their work day to speak with clients.

Clients also are able to dictate start and end times for virtual meetings. Whereas social mores might prevent them from ending a face-to-face meeting early, clients will be more likely to exit or disengage from a virtual meeting, Haman said.

“One of my children is a physician and she is quite busy,” he said. “She likes to call me to catch up when she’s driving. That way, when she gets to her destination, she can say ‘I’m done, I have to go.’ She’s not held hostage, it eliminates the possibility of small talk, and she really likes it that way because it gives her an enormous amount of control.”

Clients will also be able to reject meetings they deem as irrelevant, said Haman. Meetings must have a defined goal or purpose, and must focus on the client’s needs and preferences. Client attentiion may also be more likely to wander because virtual meetings can be recorded, replayed and reviewed.

Advisors will be forced to make their conversations relevant, or clients will tune out, said Haman. Clients are more likely to multitask and pay less attention in virtual meetings, turning to their social media ,texts or news feeds instead of paying attention to the advisor.

“Clients are going to expect a higher quality of data,” he said. “They’re not going to tolerate a talking head going on about their portfolio. Over time, advisors are going to have to accommodate a lot of this stuff and they’re probably not going to like all of the control they’re going to cede over to their clients. They’re going to have to learn how to exert not control, but influence. In virtual meetings, the relationship skills they have developed – rapport building and salesmanship – are diminished in their influence.”

Advisors will also have to be better prepared for meetings, Haman said. Without virtual cues, advisors can’t afford to just let the conversation flow. The breadth of advice offered will also have to increase to differentiate human advisors from rapidly improving and evolving digital alternatives.

One benefit to virtual meetings is the ability for advisors to convey higher quality information and use digital illustrations and videos, said Haman. Bringing strong visuals into a virtual meeting may help keep clients engaged.

Advisors should also learn to use narrative storytelling, said Haman, which helps galvanize client emotions and retain their engagement.

“The visual cortex is gigantic, and virtual meetings allow you to activate the visual cortex more powerfully than you would in a live meeting,” said Haman. “But advisors also have to get good at narrative structure and storytelling, because nobody was ever convinced by a number or a graph. They need a story.”

Advisors who can create quality narratives that demonstrate their own personal qualities and convey relevant information will be able to differentiate, said Haman.

Haman, who has a clinical psychology background, believes that moving towards more virtual interactions will require advisors to explore new adaptations of behavioral finance concepts to keep clients engaged.

Virtual meetings give clients fewer social obligations, said Haman. Human social responsibility is instinctive and strongly linked to visual cues – clients who engage virtually may feel less of a need to adapt to the social setting established by an advisor

“A virtual meeting eliminates the signals used by the human unconscious to interpret the vast amount of information that a face-to-face meeting contains,” he said. “Getting into a physiological rapport with someone requires a high degree of acuity to see them, but video can remove that. The sound is flat and sometimes muffled, posture can’t be seen because cameras are usually focused on the face, and the image is flat so nuances in facial expressions can’t be seen.”

Advisors have to be aware that client attention spans lag because their subtle physical cues are more difficult to register over virtual meetings and it may be more difficult to build rapport and comfort with clients. Haman compared virtual meetings to driving a car. On the highway, people feel fewer social obligations and controls because they “don’t see the people in other cars as real,” which is why people will say and do things to other drivers that they wouldn’t do to someone they meet on the street or in a business.

As advisors find better ways to make their messages stick over video and audio conferencing, they also must find new ways to make their clients better communicators, said Haman.

“If you’re doing client discovery, finding a client’s goals, hierarchy of goals and an idea of which goals can be traded off are fundamental to doing your job,” he said. “If you’re trying to do this virtually, you have to conduct the interview much more intentionally and in a more limited framework.”

Going virtual with more meetings may greatly reshape the financial industry in general, lessening the importance of corporate offices and centralized locations.

“Centralizing and localizing to meet new clients through events is not going to be how you get clients anymore,” said Haman. “You have to be much more sophisticated now. Furthermore, as advisors use technology more effectively to communicate with clients and prospective clients, the sophistication of the client base will increase as well and the human dynamics will decrease.”

Digital advice may be in an arms race with human advisors to effectively communicate with their client base, said Haman, arguing that it will not be long before robo-advisors are able to use artificial intelligence and hyper-realistic human-like avatars to interpret content for their clients “as realistically and comfortably as any live human interaction.” While human advisors have to spend time to learn how to work across new media, robo-advisors will be able to automatically apply best practices and create relevant narratives for their clients using natural language processing, and will be able to do so without having to wait for a compliance department’s approval.

Eventually, national and regional financial centers may decline in relevance as more people work remotely and wealth flees urban areas.

“Clients are now working with advisors without regard to geographic proximity,” said Haman. “The local footprint is less important now than it was before.”

The AB Advisor Institute was founded by Alliance Bernstein in 2004 to help improve advisor and investor outcomes through practice management, marketing and client communication strategies.