Firstly a big thank you to everyone who participated in the client survey. Your thoughts are a really useful feed into our plans and priorities.
We plan on running this survey every year and we hope that you view your participation as a way of helping us improve the service we offer you.
We received plenty of feedback; lots of it positive and with plenty of ideas for improvement. In this post, we summarise the main themes and, where we already have ideas or plans, we’re sharing these.
There were a number of topics raised and where we feel there is a wider benefit, we’re feeding those into our plans. Where an issue is specific to a client, we will address these individually.
Annual reviews
Many of you appreciate the annual review meeting with your Financial Planner but there is room for improvement.
A number of you raised points about the forms we ask you to complete before your annual review. These forms are really important to ensure we are working with an up-to-date understanding of your circumstances, but we’re looking at how we can improve the process of collecting this data. We’re currently working on a project to introduce a new customer relationship management (CRM) system to help with this as well as improve our service in other areas and help us work more efficiently.
Many of you will know that this kind of project is a major undertaking – with many options available and implications for internal processes. To do it right, takes time. We’re making good progress and expect to implement this new system in 2023. We’ll keep you updated.
Communications
From the survey, we learnt that many of you value our communications but there are a few areas where we can make definite improvements.
Firstly, it’s clear that we can improve the action plans we send after your review in a couple of ways. We can reduce the time it takes for these to land with you whilst the actions are still fresh on your mind. We also need to focus on the clarity of the actions and keeping you informed on their progress.
The good news is we are already putting improvements into practice. For example, we have revised the way we communicate progress to you – we will be in contact with you at least every two weeks with an update, even if it is to say “there is no new update”.
Secondly, there’s understandably a lot of interest in how we make investing decisions as well as the team and rationale behind these. We are going to share more around this over the coming months. We’re working with our investment partner to figure out the best approach to keep you informed of the principles and approach behind our investment decisions, and share insights. We’ll be starting by reporting back on the outcomes of our Investment Committee Meeting which is taking place this week.
Your points of contact
A few told us they weren’t sure who to address questions to. We’re aware that this has been a problem for a number of you. We are working on a new structure to support you as our client – each Financial Planner will have a dedicated team to work with them and their clients. This is going to take time to implement but it means your points of contact should be a lot clearer and we’ll make sure it’s clearly communicated with you.
In the meantime, if you aren’t sure who to, email your Financial Planner directly and your message will be picked up by your Client PA. And don’t worry, this doesn’t mean your financial planner will change – just that they will have more support which in turn means you’ll be even more supported.
We’ll continue to communicate to you on this as we make more progress.
Prioritising accessibility
We had a number of reminders to ensure our documentation is as accessible as possible – allowing for any sight problems. If you have any specific issues with reading our documentation, please let us know about them and we’ll do all we can.
A balanced scorecard
Whenever you ask for feedback, it’s tempting to focus on the areas for improvement – that’s how you get better after all and of course we’re committed to the actions included here, as well as picking up on the points raised by individual clients where appropriate.
But I’m very keen not to lose sight of the bigger picture. For many of the people The majority of those who completed the survey have experienced the benefits of a financial plan in their life. This feedback means a lot to us and does a lot to motivate the team to continue to support you and your families through your financial plan.
Once again, thank you to everyone who took the time to help us improve our service. If you have any questions, please get in touch.
