Coercing into Completeness in Financial Advisory Service Encounters

In this article, we report on design insights found during the evaluation of an innovative IT-artifact to support financial service encounters. Relating to previous work in this field, we carefully designed the artifact to omit any visualization and enforcement of rigid process structures, as those had turned out to be harmful. Our main design element was a mind-map-like content hierarchy to capture the client's situation. Surprisingly, we noticed that both clients and advisors talked about every information item visible on the screen just for the sake of completeness. They also followed a sequential process apparently inferred from the content hierarchy. We call this phenomenon "coercing into completeness". This phenomenon negatively influences the conversation between client and advisor inducing shorter discussion units and sudden, incomprehensible topic shifts. This article contributes an exploration of this phenomenon and its effects on the collaborative setting