If you’re one of our clients I’m sure you’ve heard us talk about our online community — a digital space hosted by financial planners for financial planners. But if you haven’t heard of it before, there’s a good reason. For the past five months since we launched this community, Thinkpod has sort of been our tiny secret we only share with our clients. Its members are all using Advicefront products and are keen on being a part of this movement to change the course of financial advice, through innovation and synergy
What is Thinkpod?
Thinkpod goes beyond what one would call an online feedback community. In its true form, Thinkpod is what we refer to as an “idea generation community”. I’ve always been keen on having people participate, actively, in the development of a brand’s offering. This gives people the opportunity to start a conversation, give us valuable feedback so that we can work on creating great products and services. They also get to feel like they’re part of the “behind-the-scenes” process, a real ‘nuts and bolts’ view of how we work at Advicefront.
We set out to build a community that would live around the concept of open innovation — where we not only depend on internal forces to build our products, services or organisational processes but also value external input to build those experiences.
When we invite our customers to the community, it’s crucial for them to know they are free to share any idea that will help them work more efficiently and reach better outcomes. More importantly, we want them to feel heard and that the experiences we hope to build really do cater to their specific needs.
Creating a dialogue between financial planners
One of our big goals at Thinkpod is to foster the conversation between financial planners from lots of different companies. We wanted to create a space where they could feel welcomed and free to share their own thoughts and discuss industry and profession-related topics, without any background noise.
Within Thinkpod, you have the ability to see financial advisers from different backgrounds come together and interact with each other, by adding to each other’s ideas through comments and votes. No one is anonymous, no one has a dummy name.
It’s also is also relevant to note that no member of Advicefront has the ability to share ideas or vote. The only situation in which we interact with our members is when we share updates with the community or ask for further clarifications on specific ideas. This way, we keep any chance of bias from occurring.
We wanted to keep the interactions’ space simple and clutter-free, as well. There are no private messages nor there are forums: we want to maintain the focus on each and everyone’s ideas. This sort of rule is what allows us to keep track of what our members find important for us to add to our product offering.
It’s also the reason why we’ve been able to add new features to our system constantly. For example, the fact that you can invite a client without a client agreement in place (it was mandatory before), is a direct result of an idea shared in Thinkpod. Archiving clients instead of deleting them? Also an idea from one of our community’s members, as many others.
Become part of the community
Because Thinkpod members are active users of Advicefront, in order for you to become a member you have to be a paying customer (it’s not relevant which modules you use or will be using). By belonging to this community, you’ll be able to try out new features and products before anyone else and really have a say into what you end up using.
We want this community to build itself into something which goes beyond Advicefront and that will, ultimately, serve the purpose of improving the lives of financial planners and their clients. If you would like to be a part of the movement, get in touch with me mmarques@advicefront.com or Andre andre@advicefront.com and help us build a better future for financial advice.