Episode 03 | Foundations of Service #2: What Is a Service Matrix?

Steve Seid:
Hey everyone. In this episode we're continuing down our client service model series. We previously covered client segmentation and this is the next step which is building a service matrix. A service matrix is a very simple concept. All you're doing is listing different types of client contacts and then deciding how much you want to do for each of your client segments. So in this episode we list six and these are broad buckets for types of client touches. The first is formal review, the second is digital communication. Third is client events, four is actionable, personal, five is social, and then we just have a catchall bucket that's other or unique.

Kurt Dupuis:
Yeah. So for example, if you decide that your A clients are going to get two former reviews a year for digital communications a year, get a birthday card and be invited to a client dinner, that's your service matrix for that client. It's a really easy way to lay things out. So think of your broad buckets going from left to right or West to East and each segment you've created ABC, et cetera. It's going to be going North to South. So this is a clear snapshot of how you think best to service your clients all built into one handy matrix. It's a great tool to use for you and your team to set the expectations for what each of your clients is to get from you in black and white. 

Steve Seid:
So that's segment one. In the second segment, we're going to focus on some unique client contact ideas. And this is when we get away from the broad buckets into the specific, and this will be a recurring segment on this show that we'll do over time. So to sum up, here are your two takeaways for this episode. The first is to be able to build a service matrix. And the second is to pick one of the client contact ideas that we share that you can use in your practice. Ready everybody? Let's get going.

Disclosure:
The views expressed herein are those of the participants and not those Touchstone Investments.

Steve Seid:
And welcome everybody to The Whole Truth from the Bay area, California. I am Steve Seid and I'm joined by my esteemed cohost, a gentleman who has a better college football team than the rest of us. The man...

Kurt Dupuis:
That's right.

Steve Seid:
That crawled out of the bayou and now lives in Atlanta, Georgia.

Kurt Dupuis:
Preach it.

Steve Seid:
He is Kurt Dupuis. Kurt, welcome.

Kurt Dupuis:
I don't think you're going to come up with a better intro than that. I think...

Steve Seid:
It's the challenge. Now, each time I've got to come up with those. That's the...

Kurt Dupuis:
Are you starting...

Steve Seid:
I've created a monster.

Kurt Dupuis:
Are you starting with the Costanza corner? Are you going to just leave after that intro?

Steve Seid:
That is pretty...

Kurt Dupuis:
You should just bounce out.

Steve Seid:
I like it. I like it. Well, welcome. I'm excited for this episode. We're going to keep on moving through our client service model series, and people can pick up these episodes at any point. They may not necessarily listen to each one all the way through. So it's always important that we summarize. So let's take a step back. So we're doing a minimum standard of care. So just doing the basic proactive minimum. The first step is segmentation. So you go through that process of segmentation, then you have to design your service model and that's what we're going to talk about today, which is the number of contacts and the types of contacts.

Kurt Dupuis:
Yeah. So to recap on segmentation quickly, less is more is the takeaway there. I mean you can... Assets and revenue tend to be integral parts of that process, but you can get as detailed as you want. I mean you can get blood type, favorite Rush album, whatever you want to put in there, but I think what Steve and I have both found most successful is you have the quantitative element and then you just have qualitative and measure that. And you...So just makes it easier, this is not a perfect science, it's probably more art than science. So less is more. Segmentation it tends to be illuminating for folks because they know it in their head, but to see it in black and white, it's helpful, but there's no sense in over complicating the issue.

Steve Seid:
Yeah, and so the end of our last episode, we basically had an Excel spreadsheet that had... We didn't even use assets, we use revenue, we used relationship score, we used upside score. That was really it. And we over weighted revenue, but those are basically the criteria that we use to score. Right?

Kurt Dupuis:
And again, we have a template for this. So if you want, reach out to us at thewholetruth@touchstonefunds.com and we can help you out with that, but... Or if you excel at Excel, you could probably build that yourself.

Steve Seid:
So now we're going to jump into actually the service model and start thinking about the number of touches and the types of touches. And often, I don't know if this is your experience Kurt, but it is what mine, advisors want to jump into right into the number of touches. So they'll say, "Okay, what are we working on here?" A 1242 model or 64 and it's like, let's back up and think about what are the different types of touches that you want to do? And then we can work backwards and figure out for each segment how many you want to do.

Kurt Dupuis:
Yeah. And this is where you and I... I think our personalities are different and how we look at this might be different, but the end of the day I think we would both advocate having a plan. And if 12 touches a year for your top clients seems right for you, then go with it. But don't punish yourself if that's 10 or just be flexible with how you think about that.

Steve Seid:
Yeah, and again, we're doing the bare minimum here. if we got crazy busy with all other types of things, if we were focused more on business development, What is the bare minimum, that basic standard of care that we want to give to our clients and so from a high level, I mean there's all kinds of different client touch types that you can do and ideas and we're going to explore a lot of them but I, for this episode, wanted a bucket.

Steve Seid:
Some of the ones that we talk about most often, and here's how I would bucket them. The first is formal client review. Doesn't have to be in person, could be over the phone however you want to do it. This is something where you're formally going over the full picture with that client. Usually it's once or twice a year. The second is digital. Digital communication with your clients, emails and that could involve anything. Again, these are big broad buckets. The next one is really important and very few FAs do it, and I almost require my FAs to do it, which is something called actionable personal touches.

Kurt Dupuis:
I've never heard that. No, I've never heard you talk about that. I'm curious to see what's coming next.

Steve Seid:
So in this particular case, and this is one example, they knew that the client's daughter was starting college. So she sent over a care package for the daughter's first week in college. That's what I mean by actionable personal. It's each time you meet with a client capturing things that you can then use to follow up with. It doesn't have to be extensive.

Steve Seid:
I'll give you an example. I have a daughter who's six months old. I had a baby recently. I am a fan of Indiana University basketball. I'm involved in a lot of animal charities, et cetera, et cetera. If you're a financial advisor you can note those things and it would be pretty easy throughout an entire year for you to find some way to follow up. Does that make sense to you Kurt?

Kurt Dupuis:
Yeah. Well and I think it was another one of our colleagues that brought up the idea of setting Google alerts for those types of topics.

Steve Seid:
Exactly.

Kurt Dupuis:
I know those three things and nothing else about them. You can either set on your own or have some of your support staff set alerts, if something come up comes up with animal welfare, I should send that to Seid...

Steve Seid:
That's right.

Kurt Dupuis:
A quick anecdote, just a little... That is a touch. That is a meaningful interaction that deepens your relationship, which is I think a big part of where we're going with all this. So many people see client service, the client experiences, well how many reviews a year are we doing? And that's it. It's those types of things I think that are really meaningful. I mean this is a human business at the end of the day, right?

Steve Seid:
Yeah, absolutely. I've gotten pushback or somebody had mentioned, well is this too personal? You know, taking notes on someone personally and following up in that kind of way. No.

Kurt Dupuis:
Which is crazy, I mean.

Steve Seid:
It is crazy.

Kurt Dupuis:
These people's entire financial lives are in your hands. Right?

Steve Seid:
Yeah.

Kurt Dupuis:
So no talking about their dog or their children is not too personal.

Steve Seid:
Yeah. And you bring up a good one. The animals are good too, sending stuff for the animals. Absolutely. So yeah. So this is what I mean by actionable personal. I know that we went down a little bit of tangent here, but I think it's really important. And the way that you start this process, by the way, is every time that you sit down with a client, you make it a point to capture those things. So when you're done, you write these things down, and then in your client files, whether they're digital or physical or whatever, you have all these actionable personal, okay? So.

Kurt Dupuis:
And we'll foreshadow a little bit, but we're going to have an episode just on doing client reviews and the best topics, questions, and a systematized way to go through that, but that can illuminate a lot of these things as well.

Steve Seid:
Yeah, a 100%. yeah, we're always teasing new episodes. So stick with us because we keep developing these along the way. Let's see, formal reviews, digital, actionable, personal. The next one is client events. The next one I would call social. And the final one I would call other or unique. That's just a catchall bucket of something that I didn't mention. So if we can list those out just as a starting point. And then what we can do is look through our A's, our B's, our C's, and our D's and say of all those categories, what do I want to do for each of my clients? Each of those tiers. Hopefully you guys are getting a picture in your mind, but we also won't surprise any of you. We have tools for this as well, and it's a very basic Excel based service matrix where you have your client tiers going East to West, and then North to South. You have these different types that we laid out and just putting that on the Excel sheet for each of the columns. And then what's really interesting is to calculate how many touches that, that's going to take after you add it all up, because remember we can put this down but we actually have to execute it. So it could be a point where you look and you say, "Wow, that's a lot of client touches." And again, remember this whole thing is going towards a point where you are proactive and so all these things are done over time, and when you get to the end of the year you don't even have to think about did I talk to client A, did I talk to... Because you've already done it. Obviously, building processes and execution is going to be the key with this like everything else. I guess the bigger question then is, what do you want the client experience to look like? I mean, and that stuff starts with your A clients and goes all the way down to D.

Kurt Dupuis:
And one of the big questions I think that we have here is differentiating between client service and client experience. Do you talk any about the difference between those two things?

Steve Seid:
Yes. But expand on that.  

Kurt Dupuis:
I've been racking my brain trying to think of different analogies and different ways to express this, but client service is your client calls in, they need a check, they talk to your CSA and they're friendly or not friendly, and that one touch in time, what does that look like? That's client service. That's a single point in time. Client experience is the 30,000 foot view. Take a step back and what is the entire experience? When they hear your name, when they hear the name of your company, what emotions are evoked?

Steve Seid:
Yeah.

Kurt Dupuis:
I think that the easiest way to summarize client experience is the emotional connection. I think this is going to be a thread throughout what we discuss, but I guess I just want to start just making that clear delineation between what is client service and what is client experience.

Steve Seid:
Well, and if you think about it, it's like we've all done business with a company where we felt horrible doing business with that company. I think when I call in and try to make changes to my cable and I'm on hold for a 100 years or a mortgage servicer, and what that feels like versus, "Wow, I really enjoy doing business with this company. I'm going to go back." I mean, it's no different than going to a restaurant that when you walk in and no one cares that you're there versus when people do. And I'm...

Kurt Dupuis:
As long as we're not talking about that burrito company that yells at you when you walk in. I don't think that...

Steve Seid:
That's a whole other that... So they got whole other thing going there.

Kurt Dupuis:
That's an experience. They're trying to differentiate their experience, but not the experience I'm looking for.

Steve Seid:
Even if you have a lot of clients in your book, you can create a model that delivers an experience to a client where they're like, "Wow, I really love my advisor and I would refer my advisor. He or she goes the extra few yards for me." And it can be done.

Kurt Dupuis:
I also want to give folks a sense of how crappy most companies and businesses are with the client experience. So there's a survey that Customer Management IQ put together that found 75% of executives and leaders rated the customer experience as a five on a scale from one to five with how important it was. Right?

Steve Seid:
Yep.

Kurt Dupuis:
You ask anybody about client service or about client experience, is it important, yes or no? Obviously, yes it is. But to follow that up, did a study, and I think this was like 2018, Bain and Company did a study where 80% of management thought that they were delivering a superior client experience. 80% right? This is like your analogy of everyone thinks they're an above average driver, which just statistically can't be true. That's exactly what's going on here, but then they did an interesting thing and then they surveyed the customers of these organizations, and you want to take a stab at the percentage of customers that thought that they were receiving an elevated client experience?

Steve Seid:
I have no idea. Yeah, 40%?

Kurt Dupuis:
Eight.

Steve Seid:
Eight, wow, that's insane.

Kurt Dupuis:
Eight. This Bain and Company survey came up in several websites and articles that I was looking at, looking into this idea of the client experience. I don't know if I've ever seen such a gap in what a company is trying to accomplish with what they're achieving. People are not good at this, and if you, as an FA, who put your blood, and sweat, and skin into this every day, if you could get this right, you're good for life.

Steve Seid:
Yeah, and remember that it is way more costly to go get a new relationship so keeping the relationships you have is of fundamental importance before you even think about growing the business.

Kurt Dupuis:
Yeah, and a couple more anecdotes, and I was telling Steve before we were recording that to be ready for some rants here, but it's been many, many moons ago that I read a book called Delivering Happiness, which was written by the guy that founded Zappos and eventually sold to Amazon. Who I think is probably one of the gurus in the space of client experience. There's an excerpt from that book that I thought was really telling about what client experience really is. So a customer was returning a pair of shoes and they were late doing that because their mother passed away, and so when Zappos found out what was happening, they took care of the return shipping, had a courier pick it up, no cost to the customer, but they didn't stop there. They kept going. So the next day the customer came home to find a bouquet of flowers and a note from the customer service department of Zappos sending their condolences.

Steve Seid:
Wow.

Kurt Dupuis:
So I just try to encapsulate things. To me that story encapsulates what client experience is. I think there's another truism that we're talking around here that there's three main ways that folks can differentiate themselves. One, they can do it on product and let's face it, if you're at firm A, firm B, firm C, the products that you're offering are going to be largely the same. It's very difficult to differentiate yourself on product in the financial services or the wealth management business. Would you agree with that or is that...

Steve Seid:
100%.

Kurt Dupuis:
Is that a hot is a hot take or is that pretty spot on?

Steve Seid:
No, it's 100%, it's 100%.

Kurt Dupuis:
Okay. So another way you can differentiate yourself is pricing and not many people want to get in that game, right? There's...

Steve Seid:
Yeah.

Kurt Dupuis:
If your advisory... The SEC sets limits on what you could price at and we look at a bunch of practices, we know what some averages are, but you're pretty range bound there. You're not going to compete on pricing and many folks don't want to.

Steve Seid:
Exactly.

Kurt Dupuis:
So the third way to differentiate yourself, client experience.

Steve Seid:
Yep.

Kurt Dupuis:
Probably not my last rant, but my next rant is there's a gas station. Have you ever heard of Buc-ee's?

Steve Seid:
No.

Kurt Dupuis:
It's a Texas company, and as a Louisiana guy, it takes a lot for me to give props to anything in Texas, but I will.

Steve Seid:
Is that right? That's a thing? You guys have a thing with Texas? I didn't even know that.

Kurt Dupuis:
It's like a big brother, little brother thing. It may not be for everybody. I have cousins in Texas and so this is probably just me, but it's definitely a thing.

Steve Seid:
See, I'm learning something every day from you Kurt.

Kurt Dupuis:
So Buc-ee's is a gas station chain. So I mean we're really going to spark debate here with... I know people love like Wa-Wa, and what's the one on the East?

Steve Seid:
Now we're talking.

Kurt Dupuis:
Yeah, Wa-Wa's your world from Jersey.

Steve Seid:
That's my Jersey roots, right there. Yeah.

Kurt Dupuis:
Buc-ee's is taking a commoditized product, gasoline and tobacco, highly regulated, and they are wrapping an entire experience around it. I think each store is like 70,000 square feet, which is equivalent to about 22 standalone 7-11's. They have 80 to 120 fuel pumps, so you never have to wait in line. They have 80 stall restrooms, so you never have to wait.

Steve Seid:
Wow.

Kurt Dupuis:
And they're kept immaculately clean. I think 2012 they won an award for actually the cleanest bathrooms in America, but it's... Food preparation, everything's made on site. They make the recipes available online. They have 80 different drink dispensers, you can pay at 30 different cash registers. It's big, clean, fun, and memorable. They just have such a cult following. People actually take selfies of themselves in front of a Buc-ee's because it's an experience and they're selling gasoline.

Steve Seid:
Yeah.

Kurt Dupuis:
So I just think that's another good little anecdote of how that experience can be differentiated.

Steve Seid:
Yeah, I couldn't agree more. And I will tell you this, my advisors that do this well don't really run into the fee conversation very often, is that your experience as well?

Kurt Dupuis:
Yeah. I think that's true on our side of the business too, if you're serving well, it's a good product, there's always some level of fee sensitivity, but it's not the end all be all.

Steve Seid:
This is a really good discussion. I know we kind of went on some tangents, but let me just sum up for everyone out there. We came into this episode with our client segmentation and what we did through this segment was build a very basic customer service matrix where you have the high broad buckets of categories. You have your A through D and you're basically going down the list and saying, how much do I want to do with each of those categories? So we're going come back with specific client service ideas. This is the whole truth. Stick with us.

Steve Seid:
And welcome back everyone. So let me lay out where we're going to be headed next. You've got your service matrix in place, you've got the different number of touches that you're going to do with the segments. So what we're going to do is get a little bit more specific around client touch ideas. This will start in this episode, it will absolutely not finish in this episode. As you listen to this show over time, we will continuously add new, different, interesting client touch ideas. That's something that you should get from us in a lot of different episodes, and we know it's valuable because that's one of the things when we were talking about this show with our FAs that they said, "We want to hear more about that from others." It's just a common topic.

Kurt Dupuis:
You want to play a game?

Steve Seid:
Yeah.

Kurt Dupuis:
When we talk about these ideas, this is something we do at my house. Immediate feedback, thumbs up, thumbs down, or thumbs sideways.

Steve Seid:
Okay. I like that.

Kurt Dupuis:
With how good of an idea do you think it is.

Steve Seid:
Okay.  I'm on board with that. So we're going to jump into those ideas. I do want to point out that our next episode, because we've designed a service matrix here, the implementation of the client service model is really critical. It's really important. It's taking all these different touch points and mapping them out and putting processes around that. That is critical. But we're just going to start kicking around some client touch ideas. Right? So do you want to kick us off Kurt, or you want me to go first?

Kurt Dupuis:
Yeah, I'll go first, you can just roast me out the gate. Let's go.

Steve Seid:
Okay, let's do it.

Kurt Dupuis:
So I was just thinking about ideas around memorable milestones in life. So think birth of someone, the death of someone, an anniversary, kid goes to college, et cetera. My first idea is for the birth of a child, it can be birth of a client, grandchild, whatever. It's to buy a piggyback. Anytime that you know a client has a kid, you should buy them a piggy bank. Now if you want to go baller, Tiffany has banks for 130 bucks. They're very nice. I've never owned one.

Steve Seid:
Tiffany piggy bank. That is... That's interesting.

Kurt Dupuis:
Yeah. I mean if you want to elevate it, go Tiffany or I also looked on Amazon. They are $20 on Amazon for a really relatively nice piggy bank, which I have two of them for my two daughters here in the house.

Steve Seid:
How about that.

Kurt Dupuis:
So connects money with you, gives them a gift, shows that you're thinking about them. Boom. What do you think? Thumbs up, thumbs down?

Steve Seid:
That's thumbs up. That's thumbs up. Again, I had my daughter's six months ago, if someone had sent me something like that and say, "Hey, here's your daughter's first piggy bank," man, I'd feel pretty good about that person.

Kurt Dupuis:
Yeah, and theoretically it would be with them until they're an adult. So yeah, I like that one.

Steve Seid:
Okay, so I'll throw one at you and we'll probably get through, I don't know, maybe six or eight of these in this episode and we'll, as I said, we'll keep doing more of this. I have an advisor that each year, the New York Times bestseller list comes out, he sends it to his clients and he says, we should always find time to read more, or explore, or expand your mind during the year. Pick out one book off this list and I'll buy it for you, and he does that for all his clients.

Kurt Dupuis:
Oh, that's a thumbs up.

Steve Seid:
Right.

Kurt Dupuis:
That's a definite thumbs up. Yeah.

Steve Seid:
I mean I heard that, I was like, wow, I want to do that for my advisor base. That's fantastic.

Kurt Dupuis:
Then I just need to find the time to get to reading it.

Steve Seid:
Yeah, that's exactly right.

Kurt Dupuis:
I like it.

Steve Seid:
Okay, you're up.

Kurt Dupuis:
That's a thumbs up. Okay, so this is a tough one and I will solicit feedback on this one.

Steve Seid:
Okay.

Kurt Dupuis:
As a person who has lost someone close to me in my lifetime, I know how difficult that time can be. So I'm not even sure anything is appropriate, but if you had the type of relationship with your clients that you want to acknowledge that you are there in a support capacity during the loss of a loved one. I have two ideas. One is you can plant a tree and just make sure that they know. I think that's a really good symbol that life continues and there's a lot of symbolism in there, or something maybe a little bit more practical that I've seen online is Etsy has a ton of kits that some combination of a little succulent, a card, a candle, something like that, that just has really uplifting phrases on it. And again in real time asking your feedback, because I don't know if that's just like untouchable. You don't want to talk to people or send them anything when they're grieving or what do you think about that? Thumbs up or thumbs down?

Steve Seid:
I'm going to give it a thumbs up. I mean these... When you started going down this path, I was like, this is going to be a thumbs down or sideways because it's something that I've struggled with my whole life is like how do you talk to someone in those circumstances? What do you do? What do you say? It's such a personal thing, the one that that hit me best was planting a tree. So if you did that and then sent that to him, you don't even have to say much beyond that. Right? That's excellent.

Kurt Dupuis:
It's almost like be seen, not heard time in your life, right? Just that someone knows that you're thinking about them because words aren't going to do anything, but just knowing...

Steve Seid:
Yeah. This is fantastic. We've got some good ideas flowing here, so I'll just keep us going. So I've had some success getting the next generation involved. So having, this is more of a client event ideal, although you can do it one on one.

Kurt Dupuis:
Big tease there. That's a big problem advisers have.

Steve Seid:
We know the statistics about next generation not sticking with the advisers, we know that. So if you can bring the next gen in and not just introduce yourself, "Hey, I'm a financial advisor," but actually go through an exercise with that next gen. So for example, we've got this great planner that we go through, That whole experience, one, puts you in a great position with the next gen, but it actually solves a problem of,  the older generation struggling around financial issues with the younger generation in a lot of cases, and the younger generation sometimes struggling with financial literacy.

Kurt Dupuis:
Yeah, I haven't done a ton with that, but huge problem, every advisor I know would love to solve that problem.

Steve Seid:
Awesome. So you're giving me thumbs up?

Kurt Dupuis:
That's thumbs up.

Steve Seid:
Are we all thumbs up on this? Okay, so let's do two more. One from you. One from me. Go ahead.

Kurt Dupuis:
You alluded to this a little earlier, so I'm not going to steal your thunder, but I do think gift baskets for kids going to college is a good one.

Steve Seid:
That's a good one, yeah.

Kurt Dupuis:
But I have a different one, when illness strikes and I think you can define that a bunch of different ways, right? Not a common cold, but whether it's something more serious like cancer, or flu, or just a surgery rather than sending flowers or something like that. There's a organization, a company that's over here, I don't know if you have it out there on the West Coast actually, but it's called Instead of flowers...

Steve Seid:
I don't know.

Kurt Dupuis:
Which is a high end food service. So they send you ready made meals to your door. It's not like some frozen thing you have to heat up. It's gourmet meals ready to go out of the box.

Steve Seid:
Oh, interesting.

Kurt Dupuis:
When we had one of our daughters, some friends did that for us and it just shows up to your door and you eat it. When people are likely having extended stays in the hospital or not having time to cook or something, I think it's a really thoughtful thing to throw in there.

Steve Seid:
Wow. Thumbs up. The only thing I would say is that scalable? So I'm an advisor that has 200 clients, whatever the number is. Do you think it's scalable in that type of business or do you think about it and you'd say, "Okay, this is something that for my A clients and B clients, I'll look to, but... So how do you think about that?

Kurt Dupuis:
I think I'd put that in the first class experience.

Steve Seid:
Yeah. Yeah. So those are more your A's.

Kurt Dupuis:
Yeah.

Steve Seid:
I think that's great. So all right, cool. Last one from me is, this is not just a a client touch point, it's a series of touch points. I know an advisor that is building out basically a suite of services that for their elderly clients or as folks get older that they need. So what does that mean? For example, they have seminars on Medicare, and healthcare, and things like that.

Kurt Dupuis:
Yeah.

Steve Seid:
They have recommended chiropractors and massage therapists. They have... So you get the point, you basically do.

Kurt Dupuis:
So like they're own ecosystem or referrals?

Steve Seid:
Yeah, that's exactly it. So it's almost like we're going to handle your financial life and your plans and everything, but we also help you more broadly. If you need a fill in the blank, and so you can make the list of whatever you think that looks like, but if you need this call on me, I've got someone vetted ready to go. You don't even have to think about it.

Kurt Dupuis:
Yeah, I like that. In the same vein, real estate agents, how they have their carpenter, their plumber, or whatever.

Steve Seid:
Exactly, yep. Exactly right.

Kurt Dupuis:
I've always... Do you know anyone that's integrated into the real estate community? You figure like people in transition moving to new towns or moving out of towns, real estate agents would be a great center of influence for wealth managers, don't you think?

Steve Seid:
Yeah, and I don't think I've heard that. I'm sure someone's doing it because it seems so obvious, but I'm not a...

Kurt Dupuis:
We need to take our real estate guy to lunch and I'll tease that out.

Steve Seid:
That's an interesting thought there. Well I think what we learned from this exercise with your thumbs up, thumbs down, sideways is that all our ideas are good. I think that's what we basically just learned.

Kurt Dupuis:
Yeah, and we knew that coming into it, let's be honest.

Steve Seid:
Yeah, exactly right.

Kurt Dupuis:
We're not starting with our crappy ideas.

Steve Seid:
Yeah. All right. Let me sum up here before we transition in Costanza corner. So what's the takeaway from this episode? The first takeaway is going from segmentation to your service matrix. These are broad buckets of activities and you list out the number of touches you're going to do for A, B, C, and D. So for example, for A clients, I'm going to do two formal reviews this year I'm going to do two digital communications. I'm going to do one actionable personal one event, right? Whatever that is, you can list it out. That's the big takeaway is to get that service matrix in place.

Steve Seid:
The second takeaway is to listen through these client service ideas and pick out one that is interesting to you that you may want to implement. If you get nothing else from this show over time you will get a bunch of different cool ideas for interacting with your clients, because as Kurt alluded to before, the experience is probably the most important thing in this day and age in our industry.

Kurt Dupuis:
Well like we said before is we've done the work for you, right? The deliverable from this is the service template, the client service touch template we have, right? So if you want to take a look at that, reach out to us at thewholetruth@touchstonefunds.com and you can see what that looks like, because I think through a podcast just talking about this stuff, it may be difficult to visualize, but there's a deliverable that puts these thoughts down in black and white that I think most people would find helpful.

Steve Seid:
Yeah, and all of our deliverables, the one thing we could promise is they're simple. We do not overly complicate things. We think keeping it simple is the right way to go. So we'll be back with the Costanza corner. This is The Whole Truth. Stick with us.

Steve Seid:
And welcome back everyone. This is the Costanza corner where we leave on a high note. So we've got a couple of things for you today and I want to read a snippet. And Kurt, this is someone from your neck of the woods and I'm going to read it for you. It's a picture of a five year old child, and it says, "Our hero!" Five-year-old Noah Woods recently woke up to find his bedroom on fire. The only available exit was a window. He got himself, his two year old sister, and the dog out the window to escape the fire and woke up his uncle next door to alert the rest of his family, and four other family members were treated for minor burns and smoke inhalation, but basically this five-year-old saw the fire first, woke up, and got every single person out of the house.

Kurt Dupuis:
Wow.

Steve Seid:
You don't want to think about what it would have happened if he didn't do that, but think about that.

Kurt Dupuis:
What a baller.

Steve Seid:
A hero, as a five year old., and of course the local fire department there is awarding him some kind of certification.

Kurt Dupuis:
Oh yeah, they need to put up a statue for that kid. That's awesome.

Steve Seid:
Yeah, absolutely. So you've got a little bit of announcement too for our uplifting segment.

Kurt Dupuis:
Yeah. We'll do the double Costanza corner, so we're recording this early 2020 and I am happy to announce that... Well my wife and I have two girls now, four and two, but we will be adding a little boy in a few months.

Steve Seid:
Congratulations my friend.

Kurt Dupuis:
Thank ya. Balancing out the hormones in the house and to really put a bow on it, we're buying a minivan this weekend so...

Steve Seid:
Look at that! A minivan!

Kurt Dupuis:
I'm just living my...

Steve Seid:
They're probably pretty cool at this point.

Kurt Dupuis:
They are pretty cool and that's how I know I am in my late thirties with three kids, because I think many vans are cool.

Steve Seid:
Well there you go.

Kurt Dupuis:
I'm just living my best life over here.

Steve Seid:
Awesome. Well that story made me smile and your announcement made me smile so thanks everyone for listening. We'll be back with another episode soon. You can reach us as always at thewholetruthth@touchstonefunds.com, we'll see you next time.