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.
- 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 is to understand cadence, this can be established by creating segments. Engaging with your clients takes time. 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 higher value clients. Tiering cannot be purely automatic. 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 the tier they are going to become.
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? For example, with Tier A, 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, do the review every year and send them news every 6 months. Determining your engagement plan will take some effort. In our experience, the best place to start is with your top performers. They are already doing this.
Monitor and Notify
This is the most important part of the program. Don’t rely on your advisors to remember the plan. Automate the plan and suggest to them what they need to do. Provide tools like dashboards and notifications that help your advisors know when and what they should do. This will ensure that no client is ignored.
Provide Content
If you just told 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? The best solution is to use a tool that leverages the client profile to recommend relevant and recent news.
Automate, Automate, Automate
At NexJ, we automated these best practices decades ago with our Service
Level Management capability and have proven its success at firms like Wells
Fargo Advisors and UBS. The Nudge-AI <link to nexj.ai> suite of
products uses AI to take the automation to the next level with:
- Better client segmentation into more granular tiers.
- More diverse actions in the engagement plans, personalized to a client's profile.
- News Recommendations that are more likely to be of interest to a client, including premium content that would normally be behind a paywall.
The best way to improve the effectiveness of your advisors is to look at your top performers. When it comes to client loyalty, it’s likely that they are already using an ad-hoc client loyalty program. A great advisor acts as a partner with clients and doesn’t just try to sell them more. If your clients see you 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. In the end, this a more profitable strategy than impersonal, short-term relationships. Nudge-AI enables all of your advisors to perform like your best.
Does your firm give your advisors the tools they need to be more than just sales people?
