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In recent days, world financial markets have experienced massive upheaval. Many experts will say that this was expected; that it’s a normal part of the prolonged market growth that has been experienced in recent years; and that it’s merely a ‘correction’ to an inflated market rather than a long-lasting slump. But your clients—401(k) investors, pensioners, retirees, and small-scale traders probably won’t be quite so stoic. In fact, they are likely in full crisis mode. Your advisors are fielding questions from people concerned about their ability to retire, about their children’s college savings accounts, and about their ability to pay off their home mortgage.
Clients are calling in requesting to liquidate their holdings to eliminate risk. Others will realize that their appetite for risk is severely lower than they’d previously thought and want to reconsider their overall portfolio. Others will merely be calling in to hear some calming words about expectations and market shifts from an “expert.” While these may be normal requests, in an environment as unstable as today’s, each of these requests puts your frontline staff in a high-leverage spot. It truly is crunch time for your advisors. How will they—and your organization as a whole—respond?
From an organizational perspective, there are a few important steps to take:
- Get people on the phones. Yes. This seems intuitive. But with spiking call volume as people see changes in the market, you need to make sure that you are running at peak capacity. That performance review a manager was supposed to give? It can push until next week so she can get on the phones. The Quality Assurance team? They can double-jack more calls next week. Get them on the phones. When dealing with significant call volume spikes and already-weary customers, one of the most important things you can do is maximize the manpower that’s on the phones by delaying all non-critical activity.
- Ensure everyone in your organization is on the same page. This event is not only going to impact the frontline, but everyone in the organization. Operations will need to understand the severity of the call volume spike in order to help with staffing constraints; you need to understand from IT exactly what your limitations are—be they number of transactions placed per day or mere bandwidth for your phones. Those cross-functional partnerships that we tend to take for granted in periods of normalcy are vital in times of difficulty. Proactively get in touch with leaders from these functions, and come up with a plan to enable your organization to answer as many calls as possible and process as many transactions as your customers need.
So now that you’ve maximized the number of reps that can get on the phone and speak with your clients, what should they do? How can you assist your reps in answering difficult questions from clients that even the world’s top economists would struggle to answer?
In such a situation, top-down messaging from organizational leaders is important. Frontline staff need a clear and consistent ‘talk track’ that is going to be supported by their managers and supervisors. If other recent moments of crisis are a guide, client facing staff don’t know what to say, so they either go ‘radio silent’ just when clients need to know what to do or merely make it up as they go along in an attempt to say something intelligible. As an organizational leader, you need to assist your frontline staff in understanding what to say and how to say it. There are a couple key components of this message:
- Present risks in a personalized way: While short-term market volatility can be uncomfortable for clients, knee-jerk changes to asset allocation can have significant and damaging long-term consequences for returns. Advisers can best avoid this outcome by keeping risks in perspective and looking realistically at portfolio exposures to long-tail events. By understanding a client’s history and taking it into account in the current interaction and matching the client’s preferred communication style, your advisers can help ensure that any solutions they propose will receive their due consideration from the client.
- Focus on client goals, not market headlines: Reassure clients that despite dramatic headlines in the press, they may not be impacted as seriously as they think. In such a situation, your advisers will likely know what a customer needs better than that customer will. One of the best things an adviser can do in such a circumstance is to guide customers toward a more beneficial path of action by taking control of the conversation and gently steering it toward a more beneficial outcome.
Perhaps most importantly, remind your advisers that customers need to feel like they’re having a good experience with your company. Even if there are constraints on the steps they can take to mitigate risk, frontline staff can vitally impact the customer service experience merely by the words and positioning they take. If you’re familiar with our research, you likely already know that only 1/3 of the customer service experience is accounted for by what customers do on the call, while the other 2/3 is due merely to how the frontline rep made the customer feel. Remind your advisers that by mere power of word choice and positioning, they can have a positive impact on every client’s financial future at this moment.
With these approaches in mind, your organization and staff should be empowered to overcome any perceived financial “crisis.” Now, step back, relax, and remember the same thing you’re telling your clients: it’s only a ‘correction'; it will pass; and everything will soon return to normal.