Do You Really Care About Your Clients? How Do They Know?

When it comes to growing and protecting their assets, clients want more than just a professional partner in piecing together the retirement puzzle. They want an ongoing relationship with a friendly and empathetic financial advisor. Fortunately, there are some easy ways to let clients know that you truly care about them and not just making a profit.

Let Them Know They Are Driving

One of the biggest conceits for a financial advisor is believing that they know more than the client and that their clients’ opinions shouldn’t be taken into consideration. This may seem true at first glance. After all, the advisor has acquired a solid financial education and relevant work experience in accumulating wealth. However, developing a long-term financial plan without determining a client’s end goals and motivations can drive business away. Financial advisors should let customers do the driving by finding out their financial goals and then deciding how they can best achieve them. The advisor can be the navigator without having to take the wheel from the client.

Pair Expertise With Empathy

According to Forbes, there are three qualities that investors seek in a financial advisor: personalization, expertise, and empathy. The first two seem pretty straightforward: anyone who wants to build their assets naturally expects personalized service and top-notch expertise from their financial advisor.

Yet it’s absolutely crucial to an advisor’s success that they don’t lose sight of the third quality. Empathy is the gateway to a great relationship with a client. When a financial advisor can bring up examples from their own life to illustrate a point or take the time to reassure a client that their needs are understood, they become something more than a professional to the client. They become a fellow human being. This makes the financial advisor easier to trust, relate to, and build a future with.

Play All Positions On Their Team

If growing assets was a sporting event, advisors and clients alike may be tempted to think there’s nothing to lose by playing offense all of the time. This strategy results in a narrow vision defined by a single goal: the successful retirement of the client. However, that goal can easily face interference when the client is blindsided by an unexpected loss.

To defend against this, the financial advisor needs to play both offense and defense via honest, open dialogue with clients about how to avoid losses and how to grow assets defensively. It safeguards the client's interests and helps build a trustworthy relationship as the client knows you are considering all potential outcomes.

Help Organize Your Clients' Lives

Every financial advisor has worked with clients who are painfully and thoroughly disorganized. When the time comes to schedule a "data gathering" meeting with the client, the advisor may end up gathering most of the data before presenting the client with a financial plan.

Why not change the "data gathering" meeting into a "getting organized" meeting? After the client brings in all of the paperwork, you can offer advice on how to gather and organize data, including computer data. Use this time to set up digital backups of client information. Investing a small amount of time into ensuring that your client is better organized makes your life easier, and it can also help with relationship building. Your clients will remember that you helped them make well-informed decisions, moving them ever closer to meeting their financial needs.

Before you can build trust with your clients, you must gain specialized knowledge and demonstrate your expertise in key areas of financial planning. To ensure you’re offering relevant, useful financial advice to all investors, download our guide, The Financial Goals and Gaps of Gen Y, Gen X, and Boomer Women.