Tip of the Week June 23, 2010
Trying to come up with effective Client Service deliverables can often be a challenge. When crafting a Client Service Matrix, your prime directives should be first of all, coming up with something that is meaningful, and secondly, coming up with something that you can fulfill on a consistent basis.
The consistency issue is all-important. As a rule, people crave consistency. In fact, it is one of the ways we make sense of our world. You can come up with the greatest service deliverable ever, but if you put it into action, and then stop later on for whatever reason, you have lost any momentum that you gained in the first place. As the client, I may have enjoyed the attention when you first started, but if the service I initially received “stops and starts,’ you have gotten nowhere with me in terms of making me feel comfortable about referring you. Would my friend or family member receive the attention I once received? Who knows? Not me. I’ll just hold off on referring for now until you figure it out.
When we work on the Service Matrix with our consulting clients, we often recommend that they include ‘Articles of Interest’ as a service deliverable. This is something that is extremely low cost, and very easy to do.
Keeping in mind that this is really only for your top clients, the idea behind Articles of Interest is to print off an article every so often that is of interest to a particular client, and then send it out to the client by mail to show that you are paying attention to your clients’ lives.
It’s important to know that in this instance, I am not recommending that you send out articles having to do with financial planning or the markets etc. What I am asking you to consider is to send out articles based on your client’s F.O.R.M information (Family, Occupation, Recreation, Money), and in this case, just zeroing in on Family, Occupation and Recreation.
The easiest way to do this is to start building a folder of websites having to do with your clients’ interests. Some clients may have rather eclectic tastes such as bird watching or bee-keeping, but as you know, the Internet has a knack for catering to just about anyone. That said, the usual suspects that many people gravitate to are things like travel, wine, cooking, golf, sports, and so forth.
Next, you then need to program a recurring activity in your Pareto Platform, or whatever CRM you happen to be using, for the Articles of Interest to occur semi-annually. Twice a year is plenty. When the activity shows up on the appropriate team member’s calendar, the team member briefly reviews that person’s F.O.R.M. information, goes to a relevant website, and prints off an article on nice paper. Conveniently, websites are very good for refreshing their content regularly.
The advisor then needs to take a post-it note, or a small piece of stationery, and write: “Dear Bob, saw this and thought of you.” or “Dear Mary, thought you might enjoy this.” You get the idea.
When sending these out, try to refrain from using office envelopes etc., for it tends to come across as lazy. Instead, it is highly recommended that you get some colored envelopes, hand-write the person’s name and address, and use a real postage stamp. Don’t run it through the postage meter.
If you are consistent with this, the client will eventually start to look forward to your missives, and yet it will still appear to be a spontaneous gesture. Clients will learn to spot your telltale green envelope in the mailbox, and rip it open. Because we live in an era of sorting the daily mail over the recycle bin, a letter sent out in this fashion will always be warmly received.
I don’t know about you, but the last thing I want to read at the end of a hard day is an article on dollar-cost-averaging or trends in the stock market. I have a Financial Advisor that takes care of all that for me anyway. But what’s this I see in the mail today? A green envelope holding a recipe for the “Best Ribs Ever?” Yum. My advisor knows me all too well.
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