“I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” — Carl Buehner

In our industry, where numbers, data and technology often dominate the conversation, we sometimes forget the profound significance of personalization: the human connection in our relationships with clients.

Building trust by listening

Intentional listening helps to foster and strengthen trust with your clients. In conversations with clients and prospects, they must feel comfortable sharing the most intimate details of their financial lives. Taking the extra time to understand your clients’ unique circumstances, goals and even fears send a very powerful message: “I care about you, I am listening and I’m here to help.” While this might seem basic, even the best financial professionals admit they can do better. Creating more opportunities to listen to clients ensures you continue deepening the level of trust and engagement. Do you create unique opportunities to listen to your clients and prospects? How do you do it? Is it part of your client experience process?

Offering tailored solutions

As we all know, no two clients are the same. Offering unique investment solutions tailored to each client’s specific needs and objectives is critical. Whether it’s specialized retirement planning, investment strategies, tax planning or risk management, customized advice ensures that your clients’ goals align with their circumstances and aspirations. Do you know all of the investment solutions available to help your clients? Are there new strategies you are not utilizing?

Planning and goals

By embracing financial planning with your clients, you gain a unique personalized view of the goals and objectives for their lives. That personalized roadmap helps evolve our conversation from investment performance to the clients’ changing circumstances and aspirations. Do you offer your clients customized financial plans? If not, why not? How can you offer planning to more clients and prospects?

Customized communication

This is a huge area of opportunity. Understanding each client’s communication preferences and developing a customized approach to that is critical to helping keep our clients connected and engaged. Do you know each client’s communication preferences? Do you map that to a communication plan?

NextGen

Embracing and focusing on personalization has never been more important than today. With the greatest transition of wealth in our lifetime underway, expectations have changed and will continue to change. What are you doing to customize the client experience for the NextGen investor? Are you embracing new technologies like business texting and Clear1 to stay connected and offer personalized experiences?

The good news

As part of the Atria family, you have access to people, services, solutions and technologies that allow you to focus on personalization and deepen your client relationships. To ensure you maximize personalization in your practice, contact the practice management team.