Recently I had a conversation with a Financial Advisor regarding his team, he’s one of our clients that I mentor. Our conversation focused on my observation that his team treated all client Action Items equally. I explained that whether a client is an Ideal Client or a Non-ideal Client, there’s no attempt to prioritize tasks for Ideal Clients first. This is a problem.
According to most on his team, a task is a task is a task. Meaning, whether or not the task is for an Ideal Client or a Non-ideal Client, all tasks are equal since they all have to get done. Well, in the Client Service model we’ve developed, that is neither accurate nor is it smart business. So we discussed a plan to help his team better prioritize their daily and weekly tasks.
For context, my firm provides all training and support for his team, both the administrative support staff as well as the Subject Matter Experts, who provide all the Client Service. Just so you’re clear, let me share the philosophy here.
I’m, of course, not advocating failing to accomplish tasks for clients later than we’ve promised nor later than his compliance department allows for certain tasks. No, the big miss here starts with awareness this is happening.
In this case, since he has 143 clients, his team wasn’t always crystal clear which clients are Ideal Clients. There are a lot of them, and the firm is also acquiring new Ideal Clients routinely. So the starting point we discussed was maintaining a list that all team members can access which clarifies the status of each client. A quickly accessible list of Ideal Clients resolves the awareness problem. Now when a team member is assigned an Action Item, they can check in seconds whether or not this is an Ideal Client.
Let’s say it’s an Action Item for a Non-ideal Client a team member is reviewing. There are more options than a binary option of “do the task” or “don’t do the task.” We’re training his team, to prioritize Ideal Client Action Items first, but before taking those actions, to first review all items due this week.
Some other options for routine Action Items for Non-ideal Clients (NIC) might be to contact the NIC and attempt to delay the due date. To politely beg for more time. If a team member can delay NIC Items for another 2-3 weeks, that might help focus on Ideal Client Action Items today.
But there are other possibilities, perhaps the Financial Advisor confirms later that the client is unaware of this Action Item. That this Action Item was simply an internal note made regarding something that needs to happen, but not necessarily right now.
It’s also possible that a NIC task could be delegated to someone else at times.
Bottom line, since Ideal Clients represent the 20% of your clients who represent 80% of the firm’s revenue, it’s worth the effort to always put them at the front of the line. Ideal Clients are paying the freight, and therefore deserve first class service. Changing culture is worth the effort.
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