The bedrock of client experience

While clients tend to be loyal to their advisers, enhancing the firm's client experience is a way of ensuring they stay.

You probably know that once a client selects a financial adviser, they rarely leave. In fact, according to McKinsey & Co., client retention rates hover right around 94%.

Given the loyalty clients show toward their advisers, it’s understandable that you may wonder, “Why should I put more effort into a client experience program?”

Because things change.

Those “things” could be anything from new competing technologies, continued industry consolidation, jarring market volatility or, as we’ve all seen, a pandemic. The point is that we must acknowledge two things: First, the role client experience plays in how we guide families through good times and bad, and second, the role a proactive approach plays in how you deliver that experience.

Here are three key elements of a client experience program and why they matter for you and the people you serve.

First, it’s imperative to have a vision. Something like, “To help our clients achieve great retirements,” should be your North Star. It should capture your desired outcome for clients and guide everything you do.

Your vision directs the next two elements, beginning with service standards and objectives. While of course a big part of what makes us so important to clients is the ability to personalize their plans, we still should have a standard in mind with which to approach every client to make certain we don’t miss an important ingredient.

These standards could be numerical, say, a target number of yearly interactions. Or they could be list-focused, maybe a checklist of items you use to assess the needs of each client. Whatever path you follow, to simultaneously create client stickiness that survives virtually any crisis or challenge, and to help your clients achieve their financial and retirement goals, your standards and objectives need to reach beyond each client’s individual plan.

Lastly, you need to develop a repeatable and scalable mechanism for gathering client feedback.

Depending on how many clients you serve and how you typically interact with them, there are a variety of ways to gather feedback. You could subscribe to SurveyMonkey, an easy-to-use cloud-based tool that helps users create, send and analyze surveys. Or you could simply make feedback acquisition a regular part of every meeting, or an element of the outreach you already offer.

Just a reminder: When you’re searching for feedback, don’t wait too long after an interaction or transaction to ask for it. Alternately, if you’re seeking more insight into your clients’ opinions on your overall service and relationship, this can be done at a regular interval such as annually or bi-annually.

There’s no one-size-fits-all to perfecting the client experience. Having a clear vision of what you’re doing and why you’re doing it, processes in place to consistently deliver, and an open channel to understand what your clients truly need and expect from you are key pieces to a loyal-and-satisfied client puzzle.

Implementing these best practices will better equip your firm to provide personalized, meaningful guidance, whatever the future holds.

Aubrey Macklin is director of experience design at Allworth Financial, which has $15 billion in AUM.