Keeping Them Happy
When plan advisers ask sponsor clients for their feedback, this can call forth compliments that validate an advisory firm’s service model and working style. But sometimes sponsors give negative feedback about an advisory firm’s services. Daniel Peluse has learned to welcome not just sponsors’ compliments, but their occasional criticisms, too.
“Be open to that critique, and understand that every client’s needs are different,” recommends Peluse, director of retirement plan services at Wintrust Wealth Management in Chicago. “We struggled with that early on. We thought, ‘Here is our service model, and if it doesn’t work for a sponsor, there isn’t much flexibility.’ But we’ve learned since then to adapt our service model to a client’s needs. We want critiques from our clients: That’s how we’ve improved our service model over the years.”
Strengthening Relationships Informally
Peluse utilizes quarterly meetings as an informal check-in
point with sponsors, to discuss their satisfaction with Wintrust’s services.
“We ask, ‘What’s working? And what isn’t?’” he says.
Wintrust also gets valuable feedback from sponsors by asking them to refer possible new sponsor clients. “We typically start that conversation by giving a little background on the potential client we are looking to work with,” Peluse says. “Then we say, ‘We think that we do this—whether it’s financial wellness education or something else—really well for you. Would you feel comfortable talking to this potential client about the work we’ve done with you?’ Once the client agrees, then we can dive deeper into where we add the most value on that service.”
Every time Hilb Group Retirement Services (formerly Cornerstone Retirement Advisors) sees clients, “We say, ‘Hey, is there anything else we can do to help you?’” says Jim Sampson, director, retirement advisory services, in the Warwick, Rhode Island office. Sometimes that uncovers opportunities for the adviser to solve problems, such as a recent issue with a recordkeeper, which a sponsor client spent time, trying to resolve. “We said, ‘Why didn’t you just call us? That’s what we do,’” he says. “We tell them, ‘Call us for everything. Even if you think it’s a dumb question, call us.’”
Checking in informally with sponsor clients also has given Sampson opportunities to ensure they recognize the services being offered and take advantage of them. He recently spoke with one who mentioned that a provider had offered to come on-site and do an employee financial wellness program for a fee. “The sponsor asked, ‘Is that something that’s worthwhile for us to purchase?’” he recalls. “I said, ‘No, because we do that, too, and it’s included in our fee. You’re already paying us for that.’ The response from the sponsor was, ‘Oh, I didn’t know you do that.’”
Being proactive helps keep sponsors happy with their adviser. Between sponsor meetings, Michael Clark asks his customer relationship manager (CRM) for a list of clients he has not personally contacted in the past 90 days. “Then I reach out to them and say, ‘I just want to check in and see if there’s anything more you need from us,’” says Clark, a financial adviser at Keiron Partners in Orlando, Florida. For larger clients, with a plan committee, he usually sends a group email.
Christopher Soto looks for opportunities during the year to keep sponsors informed about emerging retirement plan trends and best practices. “I hear it all the time from employers, especially CFOs [chief financial officers]: ‘What is everybody else doing?’” says Soto, an Irvine, California-based financial adviser at Wells Fargo Advisors. “So we help educate them on that.” For example, he makes use of quarterly investment reviews by adding two or three bulleted items to the written report; these give brief updates about new developments he has seen in the retirement industry.
About twice a year, Keiron has a luncheon for plan sponsors at a local restaurant or country club, and 20 to 25 sponsors typically attend. “It’s a good way for me to tell them about new trends I’m seeing,” Clark says. “I usually talk about three to five trends, such as in-plan Roth conversions increasing. I like to be the first adviser to show them the new trends. I don’t want one of my competitors [doing it].”
Setting Goals
To keep clients happy with his practice’s service, Soto
finds it helps to work with sponsors to set annual plan-specific goals, and he
has a goal-making process he kicks off at each year’s plan-review meeting. “I
ask the sponsor, ‘When you are sitting here a year from now, what are two or
three things you’d like to have seen the plan accomplish during the last 12
months?’” he says. Then they talk about how Wells Fargo can help. For instance,
this year more clients want to get a better feel for how their 401(k) plan
compares with peer employers’ plans, so his practice has worked on competitive
benchmarking studies for those sponsors.
Setting annual goals then gives Soto a focal point for the next year’s results discussion. Wells Fargo summarizes its accomplishments for its plan sponsor clients by saying, “‘Here’s the progress made on the goals you had for this year, and here’s what we’ve done to help improve those situations,’” Soto says. For example, he often does a “2% challenge” at participant education meetings, encouraging attendees to increase their 401(k) contribution by 2%. As the year comes to a close, his practice can get recordkeeping data on how many participants accepted the challenge.
When Sampson talks to clients about setting goals his firm can help with in the coming year, he stresses that the goals be realistic, should the bar not be reached. “It’s great to say, ‘We’d like to increase participation to 90%,’ but we don’t really control that,” he says. “We can encourage employees to participate, but we can’t do it for them. I’d love to set those kinds of goals, but the results are very difficult to control. So we focus on: What are the company’s goals for what it is trying to get out of the plan, and how can we help it achieve that?” he says. For instance, one client was concerned that participants might not fully understand the plan’s investments, so the advisory firm did one-on-one meetings the next year that the employer made mandatory.
Annually, Keiron Partners puts together a letter customized for each sponsor, and it details specifics on what the advisory firm did for that plan during that year. The letter generally runs two or three pages, and it has three sections: Your Plan, Your Participants, and Our—viz., Clark’s—Team. The first section confirms the work Keiron did on the plan level, such as the dates on which it submitted investment reviews to the sponsor. The second section specifies the work and dates for the advisory firm’s participant-focused efforts, such as when it did on-site participant meetings. And the section on Clark’s practice talks about its notable developments for the year, such as if it won any industry awards and if Clark received any new certifications.
Peluse, at each quarterly meeting, talks with sponsors to set client-service goals and objectives for the next quarter. These goals usually relate to broader plan-success benchmarking, so they often include actions such as taking steps to encourage higher participant deferrals. At the next meeting, he will discuss the efforts his firm made during the previous quarter to achieve those goals.
“We want to show how our work has contributed to the progress made,” Peluse says. “Our team still does a lot of one-on-one participant meetings, for example. So we may say something like, ‘We were on-site for six days. We met with 250 participants, and here is what the outcomes have been so far,’” he says. Those outcomes include results such as how many participants increased their deferral rate after a meeting. “Those kinds of things are tangible evidence for the committees that our services have made an impact,” he says.
It works best to set goals quarterly, in Peluse’s experience. “If we do something in the first quarter and then talk about it 12 months later, it doesn’t have the same impact as if we talk about it at the next committee meeting after it happens,” he says. “It’s another friendly reminder that, ‘Your adviser is doing all these things for you.’”
Key Takeaways:
- Advisers should take the opportunity at quarterly plan sponsor meetings to ask for feedback on their services.
- Advisers can use technology, such as their CRM tools, to track client contact, e.g., identifying those not reached out to in the past 90 days.
- By setting goals for the plan, either annually or quarterly, and then reviewing progress made against them, advisers reinforce their worth with clients.
- Advisers can also stand out by informing plan sponsors about emerging best practices.