Client Loyalty Programs Make Average Advisors Great
Client Loyalty Programs Make Average Advisors Great
Client Loyalty is key to growing your business. Loyal clients will let you manage more of their assets and will refer both friends and family. Having the benefit of collaborating with some of the top financial advisors in the world, we found 3 common principles for how advisors increase client loyalty. Loyalty is driven by personalized engagement, with 59% of investors in one study citing “being understood” as a key factor for selecting an advisor.
How can advisors build that understanding? It all comes down to connections:
- Talk to your clients often
- Don’t always talk shop
- And, most importantly, never ignore them
The top advisors we spoke to have developed systems, often manual in nature, to do the following. By automating the steps, we can service even more clients.
Service the Right Clients at the Right Time
The first step to building engagement is to understand cadence, and where to focus your advisors’ attention. This can be established by segmenting your client base. Engaging with your clients takes time. To decide who to contact more often and more personally, it’s important that you understand your client’s and their household’s relative value to both you and your firm.
You want advisors to engage more often and spend more resources on clients in your higher value segment. But tiering cannot be purely automatic, or you’ll miss opportunities. It’s important that advisors have a say in the tier. They may see an up-and-coming client who may not qualify for a higher tier now but is on a fast track to do so. Advisors must be able to treat them as a member of the tier they are going to join.
Determine an Engagement Plan
Building relationships with clients is the first step in developing loyalty. How often do you want to communicate with each client tier? What should you be doing at each touchpoint?
For example, with Tier A, you might send clients a relevant news article once a month, do a financial review every 6 months, and invite them to a major event every 2 years.
For Tier B, the financial review might occur every year and the news touchpoint only every 6 months. Determining the most effective engagement plan will take some effort. In our experience, the best place to start is with your top performers. They are already managing their client touchpoints to best effect, though they have likely never documented their approach.
Monitor and Notify
If a client engagement program is documented, but not operationalized, it’ll never get off the ground. Do not rely on your advisors to remember the plan. Instead, automate the plan and suggest to them what they need to do.
Provide tools like dashboards and notifications that help your advisors know when to make contact, and what to do. This will ensure that no client is ignored, no matter how busy the office gets.
Facilitate Sharing Content
If you just tell your advisors to send a relevant news article to a client, you are likely to cause them to stare in fear. Where are they going to get the news? What should they be looking for? How will they find the time to aggregate news articles for a diverse client base, while doing all their other mission-critical tasks?
You can ease this burden by pointing advisors to credible third-party sites which offer great resources. Or, if your resources allow it, you can curate an advisor newsletter with interesting articles they can share with different client profiles. That way, your advisors can deliver personalized, value-added communications at scale, without having to comb the internet for articles.
Automate, Automate, Automate
At NexJ, we automated these best practices with our Service Level Management capability and have proven its success at firms like Wells Fargo Advisors and UBS. It enables firms to create client loyalty plans that that provide:
- Better client segmentation into more granular tiers.
- More diverse actions in the engagement plans, personalized to a client’s profile.
- Automated notifications to remind advisors to take the right action at the right time
The best way to improve the effectiveness of your advisors is to look at your top performers. When it comes to client loyalty, it is likely that they are already using an ad-hoc client loyalty program. A great advisor acts as a partner with clients and does not just try to sell them more.
Once you observe what they are doing, you can duplicate their process across the organization, providing tools and prompts that help your average advisors achieve the same level of service.
When your clients see your team as adding more value to their lives and to their family’s wellbeing, they will trust you and be more loyal to you and your firm. Your investment in client engagement tools will pay off with lower attrition, increased referrals, and even increased share of wallet.
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Does your firm give your advisors the tools they need to be more than just salespeople?
Contact us for a demo, and we will show you how NexJ’s Integrated Advisor Desktop empowers all your advisors to perform like your best.
