Want to More Effectively Engage Your Clients? Learn to Chat with ChatGPT

Describe who you are and who you’re writing for

It is also critical to give context. You should spell out the persona or type of audience you are writing for and your own perspective and experience. Telling ChatGPT who the audience is helps the tool generate answers geared to their level of experience and knowledge. Meanwhile, telling ChatGPT what your experience/background is lets the tool further calibrate the answers to your perspective or “voice”. Here’s how you might use ChatGPT to brainstorm this blog post:

“List three to five bullet points on how to use ChatGPT to help advisors write blogposts and communications for clients. Write from the perspective of an experienced financial writer addressing an audience of financial advisors. Focus on how using ChatGPT can help advisors write more effective, authentic, and trust-building client communications.”

Or in the home bias example:

“Write from the perspective of an advisor with experience in global equity markets addressing an audience of HNW clients who are generally well-educated but not sophisticated investors.”

If your audience has a unique background that might require specific language, make that known as well. For example, if you are an advisor serving a niche market – doctors or sports professionals – include this in the prompt. That context may suggest certain niche-specific metaphors that will resonate with your audience.

Giving a detailed backstory on you and the audience may seem like overkill, but chatbots like ChatGPT are large language models. The “large” part means the chatbot has a deep pool of ideas and references from which to draw, so specifying a unique perspective lets it drill down to find particularly relevant material in that pool.

Use your voice for authenticity and impact

Answers to your prompt are just the beginning. Authenticity comes when you put the bullet points or paragraphs the tool delivers into your own words.

ChatGPT could write an entire post on an investment concept for you (e.g., using fixed income holdings to mitigate risk) or compose an article on a timely subject (e.g., market impact of rising interest rates). But it wouldn’t be in your voice. Your quirks, turns of phrase, and passion for the subject get lost if you let a chatbot do all the work.

Harness ChatGPT to suggest ideas – just use your own words to explain them. (Of course, if you don’t know something about the topic to begin with, maybe you shouldn’t be writing about it.)

Use chatbots to develop new topics, refresh old ones, or uncover common problems

The most meaningful communications with clients directly help solve their problems, address their concerns or pain points, or simply educate about situations they might face. Chatbots like ChatGPT can help identify common client issues and suggest content tailored to those issues. ChatGPT can contribute in several ways:

1. Suggest solutions to client-specific problems. Don’t be too proud to think you have all the answers or know best how to explain a topic. Your very experience may lead you to skip explaining something that is basic to you but still complex to a client. ChatGPT starts from a broader and more comprehensive perspective. Ask the AI tool how it would address the issue and compare the answer to your response.

2. Refresh evergreen or common investment topics. Subjects like diversification, dollar-cost averaging, or understanding risks vs. rewards bear revisiting no matter how many times you’ve covered them. ChatGPT can give you a fresh take and can drill down into aspects you may not have focused on before. And the tool never grows tired of covering old ground.

3. Uncover popular or most asked about topics. Given the breadth and depth of its training material, a chatbot can find topics or questions you may not have though much about or dismissed as too generic, but which are top of mind for clients and prospects.

You might not think “What are the top 10 concerns for individual investors approaching retirement?” or “What are the ten most common behavioral investing mistakes?” are worth writing about – after all, aren’t there already many resources that cover them? But covering topics like these as a blog post from your perspective and experience makes for interesting content that can really connect with a client or prospect.

Use a machine to better empathize with clients’ emotions and build trust

Truly authentic client communication goes beyond addressing surface-level problems; it empathizes with clients’ emotions and experiences. Your written content should reflect a deep understanding of your clients’ perspectives: what needs drive them to seek advice, what fears and experiences color their perspective. Paradoxically, AI tools like ChatGPT can help you generate very human responses by simulating client scenarios and guiding you to empathetic language.

Specify a particular client archetype or an individual client situation and ChatGPT can deliver specific language to address the situation including emotional considerations. For example:

“You are advising a client approaching retirement who is frugal and afraid of running out money despite ample resources. Suggest language to address the unique emotional needs of this situation and reassure client when making investment recommendations.”

A prompt like this will return a list of ideas which you can then explore further by asking for more detail on a particular point.

Use Chat GPT to audit your work

Chatbots make fine editors – just upload your draft and ask ChatGPT to suggest edits while keeping the same “voice” and tone. Think of it as Word’s spelling and grammar check on steroids.

Even better, chatbots can audit your work to look for missing points or gaps in your logic. Longer blog posts or explainer articles can particularly benefit from ChatGPT’s review. We don’t know what we don’t know. Our own experience as advisors can blind us to certain aspects of a topic, especially one that may have been evolving under the radar.

Give ChatGPT a prompt such as this and attach your draft:

“What important points about the topic of [describe your topic here] are not covered in the attached article? Are there any gaps in logic or missing information explaining points on the subject?”

Here is the prompt I used to audit this article:

Just be aware that the free version of ChatGPT was last updated in January 2022. Other AI chatbots such as Google’s Gemini, Microsoft’s Copilot, Meta’s Llama, and Anthropic’s Claude or the premium version of ChatGPT may be more current.

However, none of these general-purpose AI chatbots are really dynamically updated, so you will not be getting cutting-edge material. This is particularly relevant for any discussion of cybercurrencies, blockchain or fast-evolving, technology-dependent topics. This matters less for more timeless investment concepts (risk/reward, allocation, etc.) and behavioral finance habits.

Artificial intelligence can drive authentic human relationships

Advisors can build trust and credibility, leading to stronger client relationships, by addressing clients’ challenges through tailored communications. AI tools like ChatGPT can greatly boost your productivity and creativity in this process. This is especially true for advisors who are more focused on the nuts and bolts of managing investments or financial planning or for whom writing is a chore.

ChatGPT can’t do your job just yet (“No, AI Will Not Replace Human-Led Financial Advice” ). In the meantime, consider adding it or some other AI chatbot to your toolset to make your communications efforts more effective.

Ted Everett is a CFA, an investment advisor and a financial writer in Boston. He helps financial service companies create readable and insightful investment-thought leadership whitepapers and other content. He has edited and written extensively for various investment newsletters and, for the moment, has made an uneasy peace with AI chatbots. He has also served as portfolio manager and trusted advisor for families, trusts, and smaller institutions.

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