The Path to Loyal Clients

Here are some ideas to help keep your clients in your book of business.

By Lucretia DiSanto Jones

Customer satisfaction. It’s what many insurance and financial advisors insist is the main factor in keeping a client and growing a practice. Surely there’s a lot to be said about the importance of customer satisfaction, but is a satisfied customer a loyal customer? Not necessarily, says Oscar Alban, principal marketing consultant for Witness Systems, a provider of performance software and services.

“Satisfaction is good for the moment, but for the long term,” Alban says, “there has to be loyalty.”

Increasing loyalty
How does an advisor manage his practice so that he increases customer loyalty? Alban, who performs consulting with an emphasis on workforce and performance optimization, as well as customer service, satisfaction and loyalty, says advisors must be proactive.

“If I were an agent, I would put together a strategic program where over the course of a year there are a couple of touch points with my customers,” says Alban. “Not so much a customer-service survey but a loyalty survey, because what we’re finding is that customers can be satisfied but not continue to do business with you.”

The survey might include dialogue that goes something like this:

Advisor: Have you been satisfied with me?
Client: Yes
Advisor: Do you plan to stay with me?
Client: Yes.
Advisor: As your family grows, will you feel comfortable enough to have our relationship grow, too?

If the client indicates that he doesn’t plan to stay with the advisor or that he doesn’t feel comfortable enough to have the relationship grow as his family grows, the advisor obviously needs to find out why.

Making it happen
“My recommendation would be to, perhaps once a quarter, use a defined plan to get this kind of feedback—especially from long-term customers who have growth potential because of family extension,” says Alban.

Then an advisor should create a database to determine the trends that are occurring that might create obstacles to customer loyalty to his practice, much as the insurance companies do. “For an advisor to be successful, he is going to need to take some of the strategic approach that the company is taking,” says Alban.

Getting help
No time to implement this kind of project? Then hire a student to do it for you. “Get someone from a college—a business major—and have that person run a customer service, satisfaction and loyalty program,” suggests Alban.

After the first transaction with a new client, have the student call to let the client know that he will contact the client again to get feedback on the policy documentation that is on the way. The student, Alban says, could send out email surveys, also, if that is what the client prefers.

“I think that at this point, the agent has the opportunity to gather a lot of information,” says Alban. “So if there is a problem with the documentation, the agent can go to the carrier and say, ‘Look, this is where I get “dinged” the most, but it’s the area in my practice that I have the least amount of control.’ The advisor should then ask the carrier: What can you do to help?”

To learn more about the issues that customers face, an advisor can take what some would consider to be a bold step: Ask his carriers if he can sit in on policyholder calls to the carriers’ call centers. It might take time away from the office and money to travel, but it would, says Alban, give advisors a chance to hear what is happening after the sale of the policy and find out what customers are going through to get answers and service. This, in turn, will help advisors be better advisors, advocates and resources for their clients.

Perhaps what is more important, advisors who understand what issues arise for their clients might be able to do some things proactively during the sales process that will head those issues off—and give clients another reason to remain loyal.