Revolutionising Estate Planning Training: AI Client Simulator

Learning everything needed to become an estate planner and will writer is a matter of carrying out training courses, but what about preparing for interacting with your clients?

Role-playing only gets you so far and is often an awkward exercise for all parties concerned. What if there was a way to practise your customer service skills without having to interact with customers, ensuring that you’ll be ready for anything and everything a client could ask when it comes time to conduct a meeting for real?

The AI Client Simulator is the ultimate training tool for estate planners and will writers, and is revolutionising the way we think about training, as well as interacting with our clients.

Available to those undertaking our Foundation training course and soon to be rolled out to our training portal, the Client Simulator brings together the best of both worlds; we use real-world expertise and cutting-edge technology to create a seamless intermediary step between theory and practice.

How does CTT’s Client Simulator work?

As anyone who has worked in retail will be able to tell you, there’s nothing quite like the great British public. Even with extensive customer service experience, you’ll never be ready for everything; with the Client Simulator at your disposal, you have another tool to help deal with eventualities that you might encounter—but how does it work?

The simulator is designed to mimic the real-life interaction between you and your clients. To that end, the programme features an AI client that looks just like a real person, and it even speaks back to you, helping to recreate the experience of conversing with an actual client.

The text of the conversation appears on screen for you to respond to as the dialogue is spoken aloud. You then write answers to the questions asked and the avatar will respond in kind, asking follow-up questions and prompting you to think about various aspects of your knowledge, testing your abilities both personal and professional.

After the conversation is over, the programme reviews your performance, giving in-depth feedback pointing you toward areas where you may need further development or have performed well. It gauges aspects of client interactions such as:

• Knowledge: How well you answered the technical aspects of the questions. The simulator will gently challenge your estate planning knowledge.

• How you respond to questions: Knowing what to say and how you say it are just as important as each other. The programme is able to determine whether your answers are clear and concise, and how effectively you have answered the queries.

• Soft skills: Knowing how to speak to people is important in any client facing role. You will be dealing with intensely personal facets of your client’s lives, not only their finances but possibly needing to deal with your client’s awareness of their mortality, reduced functionality, family politics, or complex personal situations. Soft skills, such as empathy, are thus incredibly important.

Who can you practise with?

This ground-breaking tool has a number of template clients to work with.

The scenarios and personas available cover a wide range of eventualities, giving you the unique opportunity to ‘meet’ clients and dispense informative estate planning advice.

The simulator is a valuable tool for experienced advisers or complete beginners, giving you the chance to sharpen your skills indefinitely, and without having to worry about saying the wrong thing or getting information incorrect!

Just a few of the client types you can practise with include:

• Single person: Having a one-to-one conversation with someone (even if it is remote!), is always preferable to an impersonable email correspondence; however, communicating over a camera still throws up a barrier between you, one that you will need to be conscious of to overcome. Being able to practise customer interactions in this manner is invaluable for developing your skills as an estate planner.

• Couple: Many times you will be dealing with a couple, not just an individual. In these cases, it is going to be important to keep both parties on the same page, be aware of each of their concerns, and ensure that you adequately communicate with both at once and not make one person feel left out or unheard.

Why use a simulator over role-play or real-world experience with a person?

So, what are the advantages of this approach over simply carrying out the role and learning as you go?

One of the most important tools in an estate planner’s arsenal is the essential nature of the service you provide, and one of the most difficult barriers to overcome is a lack of trust. This isn’t anything personal against you. As mentioned, you are dealing with very personal parts of a person’s life; many of your clients will be older and not used to using technology the way CTT does.

Building confidence in your abilities professionally as well as for your own personal benefit will enable you to come across as assured in the advice that you give. Any lack of confidence or perceived lack of self-assurance shown on your part will erode the trust you have with your customers.

Nothing beats the experience you will gain from interacting with your actual clients, but experience is experience. Thanks to the development of viable AI tools, we’re able to accurately model the way clients interact with us and the types of queries we are likely to encounter.

The Client Simulator is built using the real-life experiences of our advisers, who have decades of client interactions under their belts. It has been user-tested to ensure maximum efficiency and usability and is the best tool for learning what it is like to be an estate planner and will writer. The Client Simulator is invaluable as a training tool and a one-of-a-kind experience only available through CTT!

For more information on the Client Simulator and our Legacy Software, take a look at how our innovative will writing software is helping to shape the industry.