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One simple strategy to upgrade your client experience and dramatically increase client loyalty
Here’s a simple tactic with huge leverage to improve your client experience, get your clients talking, and attract more referrals. Upgrade your review meetings. How? Focus more on what they tell you is most valuable.
What would it mean to your business if you could increase the value of your review meetings by even 10%? Every one of your clients experiences that event once, twice, maybe even more often per year. That little improvement would ripple through your client base and be reinforced over and over.
And here’s how to do it: engage your client advisory board.
When we organize a new board, we dedicate the first few meetings to deconstructing the client experience. We go through each step of your process and take it apart. Over the first year or two of your advisory board, we examine:
- Client review meetings
- Planning process
- Client events
- Investment reports
- Client communications
- Client portal
- Your website
Because review meetings affect all your clients on a regular basis, we put it near the beginning of the schedule. We explore each kind of interaction and ask what aspects provide more value and which less value. It puts you in the position of making small adjustments that can have a big impact.
- How convenient is scheduling the meeting?
- What are their preferences for in person, phone, or zoom meetings?
- Which items on the agenda do they most look forward to or learn the most from?
- How do they feel about how time is allocated among topics?
- What else can you discuss that would be helpful?
Here is a representative example. We presented a client advisory board with a typical review meeting agenda including time allocations. We discussed what clients like most about the meetings. We compared what they valued to what they spent time on. The quick consensus of the board: spend less time reviewing the portfolio and more time discussing their issues. The advisor actually saved time preparing for the meeting and the clients got more value.
Another firm’s advisory board reviewed the contents of their financial plans. Those plans included a fair amount of detailed portfolio analysis. The feedback in this case was again quick and clear. Drop the investment detail. Tell us how much we have, they said, and how it has done. We are happy to leave the technical evaluation to you. The clients felt the plans they received became more meaningful and the number of pages the advisor had to produce dropped by half.
Firms that solicit and are responsive to the preferences of their clients are rewarded with more loyalty and more referrals. With the help of your advisory board, you can create (or update) the experience your clients want most.