The late Steve Jobs gave some excellent advice when he said: “Start with the customer experience and work backwards…”
If you’re aiming to build a highly profitable practice with delighted clients who refer more clients, it all begins with putting yourself in their shoes and shaping your processes accordingly.
At our recent webinar, titled “How to Build a Winning Advice Process”, we shared some tips on how to design a client-centric process. Here are the highlights.
Tip 1: Ask for feedback
We often think we know what clients value, but how do you know, unless you ask?
Based on a poll we ran in the webinar, only around 30 per cent of practices said they had previously conducted a client satisfaction survey. Yet, such surveys – when done well – capture a wealth of information that every practice can benefit from.
Surveys can be used to create important benchmarks, including your Net Promoter Score (NPS) – how well your services are perceived and how likely your clients are to refer.
But crucially, they also uncover what aspects of your service offering your clients value most and those they value less. This understanding enables you to play to your strengths and spend your time and resources in the right areas.
Tip 2: Have a dedicated strategy meeting
In my experience, clients expect their financial adviser to be technically competent. That’s a given.
But what separates the good from the great is the ability to translate the technical details into relatable insights that resonate with the clients’ broader life aspirations. A strategy meeting provides a platform for these important conversations to occur.
Imagine a scenario where a client is aiming to fund private school fees for their children and pursue a home renovation and overseas holiday.
Perhaps all options are achievable, but not simultaneously. Alternatively, they might require compromises such as delaying retirement or increasing work hours.
Bringing interactive modelling and visual tools into your strategy meeting can really help clients visualise the options, better understand the trade-offs and to prioritise their decision making.
These are the impactful discussions that build trust and lead to long term adviser-client relationships. A strategy-first approach should also be incorporated into review meetings and adapted as circumstances change.
Tip 3: Know your cost to serve
Finally, it’s important to know how much time you spend working on each client. If you don’t know this, start by picking a sample of 10 clients and measure over the course of a year.
This will give you a good benchmark and identify ways you can be more efficient.
