After two years of annual client-feedback surveys, I have learned two important things:
- I suck at writing client-feedback surveys.
- Talking with a financial planner who really knows and cares for you is extremely valuable. Maybe the most valuable.
As for #1, let’s say only that I am thankful for clients who, as it turns out, run customer-feedback surveys for giant tech companies and are experts in the matter, and furthermore are willing to share their thoughts after year one’s sub-optimal effort.
Moving on…
As you read below about what clients get out of meeting and talking with us, I’d love for you to take a moment to imagine what it could be like for you to have someone (a financial planner) in your life whom you could meet with and talk with in this way. Would you love it as much as our clients do? If so, what is holding you back from working with a planner?
The not-well-made-but-still-useful 2023 survey and the 2024 survey gave us many insights, but the biggest one across both surveys was: Clients value meeting with us. A lot. (Most clients, most of the time.)
From 2023’s survey, we learned that clients want meetings more proactively scheduled between their Annual Renewal Meetings. We had been proactive about scheduling that one, lynchpin meeting every year. But we often then left it up to them to reach out when they wanted to meet mid-year. (Turns out, wanting to meet and getting around to scheduling a meeting are two very different things. As a result, some clients weren’t meeting with us as often as they wanted.)
So, in 2024, we made a simple but surprisingly powerful change: In our annual meeting, we scheduled not only next year’s annual meeting but also a mid-year meeting with the client.
Usually, that mid-year meeting is six months out. If there is something specific going on in a client’s life that needs sooner or more frequent conversations, we schedule meetings accordingly. Clients now always have at least one meeting with us on the calendar, which you know is reassuring! (Well, almost always, because I can’t guarantee anything.)
From 2024’s survey, we learned that, out of many different things we do for clients (tax return review, open enrollment advice, email reminders, etc.), clients value the meetings, or perhaps more accurately, the conversations with us the most.
Why do clients get out of these meetings? The meetings can (paraphrased from the survey responses):
- Remind clients of The Big Picture
- Provide accountability
- Answer tough questions
- Give peace of mind
- Provide reassurance that someone is looking at all this finance stuff and that the plans are on track (or that we’ll tell you if they’re not!)
- Help you navigate big life events (like having your first child)
What Does This Mean for How We Serve Clients?
Happily, I don’t think we need to change much in order to honor the feedback we got from clients. We’ve worked hard over the last several years to find a cadence of meetings and a focus for our meetings each year that serves both our clients and us well. (As it turns out, serving one well is often synonymous with serving the other well.)
The cadence of:
One Big, Comprehensive Annual Renewal Meeting
+
One Mid-Year Check-In Meeting
is good for most of our clients most of the time.
Some clients, some years, need more meetings. Either their lives or their finances are going through something challenging or complex (Having a baby! Moving! Going through an IPO! Buying a home!), and we simply need to talk more frequently. Cool. That’s the nature of the work. It waxes and wanes.
You’d like to think that “finances! So objective! So number! I can certainly just create a well-defined process and calendar around this, press Start, and off we go, in perpetuity.”
And yet. And yet.
One of my favorite ideas is that my job as a financial planner is “to be there when you need us.” Hell, it’s even on our website!
The challenge? “When you need us” is pretty unpredictable. So how do we run our business so that we can reliably “be there for you when you need us”?
I need two things to be able to honor this value:
- the time to meet with you
- enough of the the right energy to meet with you
To get both of those things, I think the solution is:
- Have few enough clients. Fewer clients = lower level of recurring work = I have space in my calendar and a sense of “spaciousness” for those higher-need situations.
- Having a personal practice like meditation. This helps me show up for you in a way that is grounded, receptive, and curious.
We already do those two things (though I benefit from continually reminding myself of their importance). So I won’t be making any dramatic changes based on these survey results.
Sure, there are some tweaks to further refine how we work with clients. I can’t imagine that will ever go away. But we seem to have gotten the most important stuff right, and I want to continue to enable me and the rest of the team at Flow to continue to do that.
Other Things Clients Value
Lest you think that the only thing clients get out of this work are our sparkling conversational skills, clients also called out that they value:
- Us following up with them to make sure their tasks get done
- Quick responses
- Attention to detail
- Knowing that they can reach out to us any time about pretty much whatever
- The personal updates in our quarterly client newsletter (Everyone always wants to know about Janice’s cows, Yerim’s and my dogs, the family trips, and sometimes the not-so-pleasant updates, like scary health diagnoses!)
I’ve only done feedback surveys for two years now, so there’s a lot we haven’t asked clients about. But it was interesting (and helpful and reassuring) to see this trend already just two years in.
I’m looking forward to exploring more aspects of our client relationships and service and value in future years and see what else we can unearth from our clients. The goal is always to identify what our clients want and need, not what I think they want and need, to be happier with both their relationship with us and with their lives and finances.
Would you find it valuable to work with someone who deeply knows you and your finances and who is committed to being there for you when you need her? Reach out and schedule a free consultation or send us an email.
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