Financial planning firm adds £25k to bottom line and takes on new member of staff as result of survey.
Challenge
Client service is really easy to get right. Although many financial planning firms struggle to communicate effectively, which impacts on the quality of the service, this wasn’t one of Bourlet Consulting challenges.
Their key challenge was: How could they keep on growing and offer the same level of service? Could they streamline their processes for taking on new clients and reviewing existing clients, without compromising anyone’s experience?
They are a fast-growing firm of Chartered Financial Planners based in the South West. Founded in 2004, they have seen client numbers grow from 2012 to 2016 by 155% and assets under management by 240%.
As well as insight on this challenge, there were 3 additional objectives:
1. Retention
- To understand the “temperature” of a mix of influential clients
- To demonstrate to key clients that their opinion was valued
2. Insight on the customer journey including:
- The take-on process
- Annual reviews
3. Future acquisition
- To understand why clients choose Bourlet Consulting
- What else would clients like to see Bourlet Consulting offer
Results
The insight led to the client-take-on process being altered so that:
- An element of the process has been monetized – (year 1 has seen around £25k added to bottom line) this extra income has led to the employment of another member of staff – a year earlier than expected.
- Time is being invested on the best-fit clients, rather than spending the same amount of time on all clients
- There is less risk associated with the take-on process. An agreed menu of pricing options has proved very effective in monetizing the value provided in the take-on process.
- Clients experience a much more bespoke service and as a result retention and referral rates are expected to increase
How we got there
- Bourlet selected around 15 of their key clients – which represented a good a spread
- Bourlet and Motem designed the questions together
- Bourlet sent questions and asked their replies to go to Motem – who followed them up with a conversation to elicit more detail.
A report was written and presented to the Directors with findings and recommendations.
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Testimonials
“Our clients enjoyed being asked their opinion by someone independent of the business and I have already referred Motem to a number of our contacts. She was chosen as she has excellent interpersonal skills, listens very carefully and asked intelligent questions from the responses given. Our clients liked her (critical for us) and the survey was completed on time, on budget and the results were well presented in a report for us together with a presentation face to face which we valued. We were keen to understand the softer issues and the insight proved invaluable to us in improving our client experience.
Robert Johnson, Director