Financial advisors understand the importance of providing every client with excellent customer service. And yet, despite the best of intentions, advisors sometimes fall short in this regard. Why?
At one level, failing to deliver a great client experience to everyone in a book of business simply comes down to time. While people might have the impression that advisors spend the majority of their time in client meetings, the reality is often quite different for these busy professionals. In fact, according to one survey, the average advisor spends less than 20% of a typical week meeting with clients. Meanwhile, 26% of their time is spent creating financial plans and preparing for meetings. By devoting so much of their week to these routine tasks, advisors may have difficulty finding enough time to build new client relationships and strengthen existing ones.
Crafting the ultimate client experience requires careful navigation of a few specific roadblocks — common obstacles that can make the difference between a business that is surviving versus one that is thriving.
Roadblock No. 1: Personalization at Scale
To be a growing advisory firm, you must be an efficient firm. In an ideal world each advisor would have an employee dedicated to client services, but the economics of such an approach often don’t make sense. In a nutshell, advisors who are taking on new clients must ensure that the time and costs of serving each additional client are declining. That’s the only way to continue offering the same great level of personalized attention to everyone you serve.
Roadblock No. 2: Consistency
When a wealth management firm is starting out, it may be possible to get by with manual processes. But as each advisor takes on new clients and as more advisors join the firm, the limitations of manual solutions become impossible to ignore. Some clients will get a different experience than others, and some advisors in the firm will provide varying levels of service. The goal is to provide a consistent, repeatable experience that can be delivered by anyone on the team— and manual processes simply don’t support this goal.
Roadblock No. 3: Keeping Client Data In Sync
As firms grow, their use of various systems to store and track information tends to grow as well — from planning and portfolio management software to customer relationship management (CRM) and marketing databases. In turn, client data gets spread over multiple platforms, making it more difficult to keep data in sync among disparate systems and more time-consuming to prepare for meetings or generate reports. Fortunately, navigating around this roadblock doesn’t require abandoning technology. Rather, it requires advisors to agree upon a single source of truth for client data that is easily accessible by anyone at the firm.
With Salesforce, advisors can overcome these important roadblocks to create the ultimate client experience. And ShellBlack can show you how. Click here to learn more.
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1Kitces Research, How Financial Advisors Actually Do Financial Planning, 2018: How Financial Advisors Actually Do Financial Planning (kitces.com)