A review process to impress

Are you ready to start making some of the more exciting features of your CRM work in your favour, improving your clients experience while simultaneously taking up less of your time and reducing the potentially costly possibility of mistakes?

This blog we will focus on the process you use to conduct your annual reviews for clients.

Your goal is to critically appraise your review process, and then take steps to improve it in view of compliance and user experience (for both staff and clients).

Why it’s important

For many financial planning practices, the review is the single most important interaction with your clients. Generally, this is the time (often once per year) that you meet face to face with your clients, provide Fee Disclosures and the renewal or opt-in every second year (for now, this is moving towards annually). This is often the time where you run through the fact-find and risk tolerance questionnaire, try to catch up on their circumstances and any changes, relay the status of the markets, their investment portfolios and future considerations of their position. This is also where a lot of the continued rapport building occurs.

In my experience, the review process usually goes something like this:

1. You look at a spreadsheet that tells you all your upcoming reviews. They have been entered into the spreadsheet manually, and you have to remember to look at them periodically.
2. You (or your CSO/associate adviser etc) call the client to book a review.
3. You put together a pack of documents that summarises the clients records (as far as you are aware).
4. Your CSO (if you’re lucky to have one) hands you a stack of documents that need to be discussed with/signed by the client before the close of the meeting.
5. Inevitably, something isn’t completed. Perhaps the client forget their new ID, or needed to review additional info to finalise their fact find.
6. You spend up to a few weeks chasing these documents.
7. You write an SoA/RoA for the client, which takes another couple of weeks to finalise.
8. Then you need to send this to the client for review / signing (or arrange another meeting to run through this.

Some issues I see with this common process include:

• There are numerous places to miss important steps or make mistakes
• It’s not efficient
• It isn’t client centric, and doesn’t leave them feeling like you know exactly what’s happening in their lives financially.

We want the client to feel valued and heard, and as though you know their situation as best as possible. You also want to make the best use of that hour or so that you spend with the client. Finally, asking clients to print, sign, scan and email back documents is extremely inefficient and there are better options out there.

What to do 

Here I am going to outline some of the exact steps that I recommend that advisers follow as part of their review process. These are suggestive only based on my personal and professional experience and the feedback I've received from advisers, staff and clients over the years. That does not mean this is the only way and you should always strive for the best decision for your practice.

"the only constant in life is change"

-Heraclitus

My suggestion is to change the order of events with which the review occurs to better utilise both time and interaction.

• Begin the process 2-4 weeks prior to the review date

Set a recurring task to check for upcoming reviews and do this the month before. If you get the Scheduler addition to XPlan (additional cost) then you can have this part automated as well.

• Send upcoming review offer email

By using Calendly (or a similar alternative) and building an email template within XPlan, this process can be automated. This lets client find the most suitable time in their calendar based upon the availability within your own. This also comes with automatic reminders as an option.

• Be prepared

Collect information ahead of time (in the lead up to the meeting) instead of during or after the meeting. You can either send the current Fact Find or request specific information.

• Use the information you gather

Utilise the information that your client has provided to ensure you are having meaningful conversations, delving into the client, situation and goals. This will create a stronger relationship and more trust as you have taken the time.

• Use Digital signatures for the documents

For all internal documents (and some external), DocuSign allows the clients to review and sign these electronically via any device. No printing, scanning, quality or delay issues.

• Record / Statement of Advice

By following the above process you should be able to present the relevant advice document either during or shortly after the meeting while the information is still fresh and before life gets in the way. This will lead to better engagement and better service for the clients, and streamlined services for the office.

• Automate the workflow

This whole workflow outlined above can be built into your CRM as a workflow to walk you through the steps and generate the emails, tasks, documents and prompts based upon review dates. No more manual entry!

The inclusion of external technologies can make this process even more streamlined allowing you more time and more focus on the parts of your business that can not be automated - like real and deep conversations with clients.

How to do it

Building this workflow involves a fair few steps and requires some background knowledge of how to do it in each CRM, and what I go through here is not a full detailed depiction of each step and event. This thread won't work properly if your key dates aren't in order in the CRM itself.

The workflow I recommend works best with additional technologies and apps, specifically DocuSign and Calendly.

The basic premise to building workflows is to first build the relevant diary events, templated documents, emails and tasks, then combine them in specific ways. The magic happens in how all the pieces are combined, with the completion of specific tasks automatically generating emails or documents, with minimal (if any) manual entry. When it works properly, all you have to do is "follow the bouncing ball".

Briefly, these are the things that need to be built for the workflow to work.

Diary Event to design

1. Design a Diary Event called "Review Meeting"

Document to create

1. Review Agenda

Emails to build

1. Upcoming review appointment
2. Thank you for booking

Tasks to build

1. Check for upcoming reviews
2. Send review offer to client
3. Send Fact Find and Risk Tolerance
4. Add Diary event
5. Prepare Meeting Pack
6. Finalise Meeting Notes
7. Prepare Advice Document
8. Send Finalised Fact Find and Advice Document via DocuSign

Workflow to build

1. Consolidate and combine these tasks, emails and documents into a single workflow
2. This workflow is to be activated for upcoming reviews as specified by your practices.

Other Templates

• Calendly

This will need to be set up; meeting name, duration, frequency and other details.

The free version of Calendly allows a single event type which is sufficient for Reviews. If you wish to add branding and extra event types, the costing is available via Calendly's website

• DocuSign

This account will need to be established; templated documents can be created once active.

You will receive a 30-day free trial of DocuSign which can be cancelled at any time. Then you will need to confirm which subscription you require, the costings for these are available via the DocuSign website

Note: references to XPlan are additional features required. These are not required for other systems and CRM's

Change can be hard and confronting, but sometimes it's necessary in order to thrive. If you didn't like my thread, that's okay, the most important part is that you take this opportunity to critically look at your own process and see where it could be made better.