Financial Advisors – Are All Your Team Members In the Loop?
Your team members will never miss another relevant piece of information when you standardize your form of communication.
Imagine you and your team are gathered in the conference room with your client. The purpose of this meeting is to recommend some new financial proposals. You’ve welcomed the client, introduced the topic and turned the discussion over to team member A.
Team member A is passionately and succinctly outlining the recommendations, when suddenly team member B cuts in with, “That won’t work. We liquidated that asset last month.” Team member A stands there with egg on his face saying, “No one told me that. Well, that changes everything. I guess this is what we could do instead.”
At this point, how comfortable is your client going to be? Feeling confident? How are you feeling? Embarrassed?
Hopefully, you never have team members make mistakes because they’re not in the loop. However, one of the biggest employee complaints in any business organization, regardless of industry, is poor communication. There has to be good communication between all of your team members.
The best way to achieve good communication is by standardizing a process for collecting and reporting information. A standardized format will simplify the process and ensure important details aren’t omitted. Your team members will be able to quickly absorb the information.
Most likely you like your team members to report to you all client interactions. Are some sending short e-mails with certain pertinent details missing while others provide lengthy, detailed reports that are difficult to absorb? Are there E-mails flying back and forth between a team member and a client and they’re simply "cc-ing" you on all emails? No wonder communications get lost.
A standardized format is the only foolproof way of collecting all of the relevant details in one place. Can you envision how impressive your team will be when no client ever has to fill in any team member with the details of any conversations with another member? Imagine how confident you will be when your team of internal and external professionals is always fully informed about all client communications relevant to the recommendations they are expected to provide.
Of course, it’s up to you as the trusted financial advisor to decide under what circumstances your standardized form will be submitted. Experience has shown that "more is better." However, let me just add a caveat to this: Don’t go overboard the other way insisting everyone share every minutiae of information with everyone which leads to overload.
If you don’t have a standardized format, many financial advisors have expressed appreciation for The Interaction Log™ within The Trusted Advisor Toolkit, because it really works. Why not check it out?
