RIA firms can significantly benefit from adopting a team approach that fosters collaboration to deliver value-added services to clients.
A key aspect of this team approach involves creating multidisciplinary teams – comprising professionals with diverse expertise – such as financial planners, investment analysts, tax specialists and estate planners.
By leveraging the collective knowledge and skills of these team members, a firm can offer comprehensive and customized solutions tailored to each client. Clients benefit from having this access to a broader range of expertise and resources within the firm, ensuring that their financial needs are addressed comprehensively and proactively.
A team-based approach promotes a culture of continuous improvement and professional development. Regular team meetings, training sessions, and collaborative projects provide avenues for skill development and growth, ultimately enhancing the firm's collective expertise and capacity. Your team members have the opportunity to learn from one another, expand their skill sets and stay on top of industry trends and best practices.
Level Best's founder and principal consultant, Charesse Spiller, knows the value of adopting a team approach at your firm. She and her team work to empower financial advisors and teach them how to improve operations. The help with developing workflows, maximizing technology and creating a service calendar for firms.
Building a client service calendar is a critical aspect of a financial advisor's practice. I caught up with Spiller to learn more. Click on the video below for our conversation.
Transcript:
Suleman Din: In the magazine, we talked about client experiences and how to have a better client experience. It’s one simple question – if you could talk about one important takeaway about client experience to anybody who's picking up this issue of the magazine should really think about.
Charesse Spiller: If I could select one objective for all firms in the industry to maximize their client experience, I would probably say focus on your team approach. So with that being said, a lot of advisors and teams think that the advisor is the only person who should be taking ownership in the client journey, but I think that's not true. Most of the successful advisory practices that I'm working with have a team approach. They bring in their administrator and operator, basically taking their back office and finding ways to put them in the front office as well.
Din: If you had one sort of actionable tip where someone could start – we specifically highlighted a quote that you had about service calendars. Is that something where you would say, make sure you have this in place and make sure that's operationalized?
Spiller: Yes. My key takeaway would be to not only build your client service calendar, but also identify accountability and ownership out that service calendar. When touch points are being built out, assign them to specific roles in the company so that person can understand the impact that they are bringing to the end client.
Din: Charesse, thank you so much for participating as a resource for Action Magazine. I know the community will appreciate it and I hope we can have you back as a regular contributor to the magazine itself.
Spiller: Thank you. Thanks for having me.