More than 78,000 Australians have now visited the BT Financial Group (BTFG) Adviser View website, with over 2,000 consumers providing testimonials on their financial adviser, giving them an average rating of 4.89 out of 5.
This overwhelming response sheds new light on how consumers highly value their financial planner, making Adviser View one of Australia’s best source of information and consumer feedback on financial advisers.
“Adviser View lets consumers do the talking on their advice experience and to vote with their fingers,” says Mark Spiers, General Manager, Advice, BT Financial Group (BTFG). “We have given Australian consumers of advice a voice and this is translating to greater confidence.”
Over the coming months, Adviser View will include even more information on advisers including their work history, as well as making some functionality enhancements to continue to make the online site state of the art.
The tool will continue to be developed to respond to great consumer feedback such as:
– ‘Having Matthew involved in our financial planning has been a highly rewarding experience. It has been a relief having him involved and giving us guidance in so many areas.
– Jin has been our guiding light for our financial situation and goals and has made the process incredibly simple, effective and easy to understand. Jin has a wonderful personality, sense of humour and passion for her role and comes extremely recommended from us.
– Jennifer is always very professional and always explains things to us clearly so that we understand everything. I would have no hesitation in recommending her to friends as we have been very pleased with the advice we have been given by her.’
“Adviser View will become the pre-eminent online site for Australians looking for financial advice, their first port of call for trusted information, connection and ideas exchange on all things financial,” says Spiers.
Since the launch of Adviser View in October last year, more than 78,700 Australians have visited the online site with more than 62,200 searches completed. The majority of these searches have been for the name of a particular planner (32,100), followed by location searches (26,000) for someone accessible and local and speciality searches (3,600) where consumers are looking for a specific skill.
“Australians increasingly want to pick and choose the time, place and how they engage with what advice has to offer,” says Spiers. “We believe our flexible consumer approach is changing advice forever.”
To date more than 2,100 customer testimonials have been received on more than 440 advisers with the average 4.89 star rating out of 5. Thirty-one pieces of negative customer feedback have been received, representing 0.01% of the total.
Customers are invited to rate their adviser on the following criteria:
– Explains things clearly and makes it easy to understand
– Demonstrates knowledge and expertise
– Responds to my needs and follows through
– Would recommend them to others.
“We want to provide more advice to more Australians and by bringing together the professionalism of our advisers through digital consumer access, we can do this,” says Spiers. “There is absolutely no point in having highly regarded planners that no one can find.”
Background
Adviser View was launched in October 2014 in recognition that Australian consumers want greater transparency and more control of their financial future. It was launched in conjunction with our Advice Commitment which outlines the service standards of our advisers and the new minimum qualifications standards for our advisers.
Adviser View, accessible via www.btadviserview.com.au includes:
· Advisers’ education, qualifications, specialities and current license. All qualifications are verified by independent verification agency, First Advantage.
· The ability for clients to rate their advice experience based on four questions. Responses will be shown on the register as a one-to-five star rating against each question for each adviser.
· Functionality to search for advisers by name, postcode and speciality.
· Free-text section for clients to provide qualitative feedback about their adviser.
Source: BT Financial Group
