Toronto-based Echelon Wealth Partners has promoted its chief marketing officer, Deborah McGrath, to the role of chief client officer (CCO).<\/p>\n
McGrath will be charged with gauging client satisfaction and optimizing client retention, something that is particularly relevant in situations of wealth transfer, when there is a significant risk of client flight.<\/p>\n
During wealth transfer (something the industry will soon be dealing with on a large scale as demographics shift), 80% of recipients leave their parent\u2019s or partner\u2019s advisor, McGrath says.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhy do they leave? They leave because they never knew who the advisor was in the first place,\u201d she says. \u201cEither that was mom and dad\u2019s advisor, or that was my partner\u2019s advisor. I don\u2019t know anything about them. They never actually spoke to me.\u201d<\/p>\n
While it\u2019s a risk for any organization, McGrath says, there\u2019s an easy remedy advisors can turn to: simply meet with clients\u2019 children.<\/p>\n
\u201cWouldn\u2019t you love your child to be educated on how to budget? I mean, it isn\u2019t always just a conversation within the home. A financial advisor can help with that,\u201d McGrath says. \u201cI\u2019m sure every parent would actually be much happier if their kids went off to university and didn\u2019t call home for money \u2026 Creating those client touchpoints, you can have conversations much earlier, in a much more in-depth and holistic way, that actually provides that value proposition that every company is going for, which is service excellence.\u201d<\/p>\n
Part of Echelon\u2019s strategy for service excellence is a newly created client satisfaction platform named Achieve, which includes a survey that asks questions about clients\u2019 needs and solicits feedback on Echelon\u2019s service.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think every company is kind of guilty of it, where you assume that your clients are happy,\u201d says McGrath. \u201cBut stats show, and it\u2019s particularly indicative of Canadians, that we can be quietly unhappy.\u201d<\/p>\n
The creation of the CCO role, she says, will give Echelon access to a\u00a0 \u201ctrue, measured lens\u201d on its client base, something which isn\u2019t quite as common in the independent brokerage space.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think [David Cusson, Echelon CEO] was really open-minded to being a little different in the independent space, of behaving a little bit more like the banks do, and asking our clients \u2018how are we doing?\u2019\u201d McGrath says. \u201cIf you\u2019re a company that\u2019s looking for the long-game, which Echelon is, the customer service is going to be \u2018it,\u2019 because there is no other way in which to satisfy and keep and retain, if you don\u2019t build trust one relationship at a time.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Advisors can reduce the risks of wealth transfer by meeting with client\u2019s children, says Deborah McGrath<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":38954,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2354,2348,2336,2312],"tags":[2333,2431],"yst_prominent_words":[5834,31874,31873,31872,31871,29785,29375,25800,12399,11107,9801,8001,6258,6252,1811,4828,4766,2263,2143,2141],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.investmentexecutive.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/356654"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.investmentexecutive.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.investmentexecutive.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.investmentexecutive.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/38954"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.investmentexecutive.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=356654"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.investmentexecutive.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/356654\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":356655,"href":"https:\/\/www.investmentexecutive.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/356654\/revisions\/356655"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.investmentexecutive.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=356654"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.investmentexecutive.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=356654"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.investmentexecutive.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=356654"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.investmentexecutive.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=356654"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}