Tips and tricks to enhance the client onboarding experience

If it wasn’t for your clients, you wouldn’t have a firm to operate. After all, the client onboarding experience is one of the most critical pieces of the advisor-client relationship.

Not only does it give the client a chance to get to know their advisor and how they operate but it also gives the advisor a chance to build that relationship and their goals and objectives. And the last thing clients want is to be subjected to a clunky or disorganized process.

Onboarding new clients is more than just a series of steps or tasks. It’s a strategy for growing a sustainable advisory business. There are right ways to handle new client onboarding and wrong ones.

Colin Day, financial advisor at Correct Capital says his experience with the onboarding process has become less reactionary and more structured.

“We’re much more proactive in terms of our approach,” he says. “We're much more systematized as we know who our ideal clients are, and we hope to attract those people. That’s how we've built the business.”

Day notes that one of the main priorities for any firm is to always maintain communication with the client during the onboarding experience.

“The onboarding process can be a lonely time for the new client because they don't know what's going on. It could be unsettling to not know how long the process might take, because financial institutions don't play nicely,” he says.

Billy Spencer, director and wealth manager at Crestwood Advisors believes a good experience for the clients is when they’re doing the talking for most of the meeting and feel understood versus a bad experience where the advisor’s doing all the talking.

“If the client's not having a chance to share what they're looking for, any sort of advice that comes after that isn't really tailored to what their needs are,” he says. “It’s about having an experience that makes them want to come back for more and refer us out to their friends and family.”

Spencer emphasizes that the onboarding process should be adaptable to each client's individual needs. "Every client's coming in with a specific reason why they're coming to talk to you," he says.

That’s why he follows the CFP Board’s 7-Step Financial Planning Process to help inform the onboarding experience, noting that understanding the client’s personal and financial circumstances and identifying and selecting goals are also critical of the onboarding experience.

Abacus Planning Group uses role play as a tool to review their onboarding checklist, explains Stephen Maggard, financial advisor at the firm.

“Last year, we chose different team members who were clients, and we put them through our onboarding process, who later provided feedback. We also had two people be advisors and other team members observing the interactions. It allows us to have our own internal feedback mechanism.”

Kim Abmeyer, founder and wealth advisor at Abmeyer Wealth highlights her structured workflow that she’s implemented over the past year. The process includes a prospect deliverable, welcome emails, and automated tasks managed through Wealthbox.

“It’s been a huge benefit. It kicks tasks to the next person so there's really no way that we can drop the ball unless we just aren't really paying attention,” she says.

Alternatively, the greatest compliment – or problem - an advisor can have is having to turn clients away as they reach capacity, causing them to create a waitlist.

“From a capacity perspective, one of the things that we're considering is how many people we're bringing on board at any one time,” Day says, noting that Correct Capital has a small staff of 10. “We were toying with the idea of being able to onboard three people a month and create a pseudo waiting list for everyone else, letting them know when we're ready to bring them on board.”

Ultimately, what should advisors avoid doing? Maggard believes advisors should always be meeting the expectations first set with the clients, not having to reset them.  

“Setting improper expectations, poor execution, and poor follow-up and communication leads to a bad experience [with clients],” he says. “If people are coming to us from their advisor, it's not because investment returns or strategies, it’s communication. Failing to deliver on the communication front will quickly sour your clients first year experience.”