Trust is an elusive quality. It can take years to create, but just moments to destroy. It can be the foundation of something truly monumental, but removing it can cause a whole edifice to collapse. We all believe we can be trusted, but extend it to others only when it’s been earned. Never trust a skinny chef.
It has been said that if you have four or five people in your life whom you can truly and unequivocally trust then you should consider yourself extremely lucky. And if you are not one of those people for others, perhaps it’s worth rethinking just what role you do play.
A key message that came from a Most Trusted Adviser Award Winners Insights webinar last week is that trust is built on more than being or doing just one thing. Greg Lourens, co-founder of the SAM Group, who was earlier this month named the 2015 Most Trusted Adviser by Beddoes Institute, said it can be expressed as a kind of equation in three parts.
“Credibility would be one – your qualifications, your experience and your compliance and all those things that are important and give you credibility in the clients’ eyes to be able to trust you; but added to that the next one would be reliability,” Lourens said.
“So credibility plus reliability. And that is doing what we say we will do. If we say to a client we will phone you tomorrow at 10am, then we must make sure we phone them at exactly 10am – not 10.30 or another time. Pretty much under-promise and over-deliver in that space.
“And then the final part of the equation would be the intimacy side, which would be close relationships…asking better questions when you’re talking to clients, genuinely focusing on their needs and having a genuine feeling towards them.
“In summary, trust would equal credibility and reliability and intimacy.
“Put that together and I think you’d be getting closer to building a good relationship – a trustful relationship – with clients.”
The right client to start with
But Lourens said it is all built on making sure his business is servicing the right sort of client to begin with. If someone presents who can’t be helped – or who can’t be helped as effectively as Lourens would like – then they are told that, honestly and without embarrassment or reservation, and they are referred elsewhere. Lourens said it doesn’t happen often, but it’s just not worth taking on a client who does not fit.
In the same webinar, David Reed, head of The Retirement Advice Centre said his firm had realised some time ago that its value proposition wasn’t really hitting the mark and so it rebuilt it from the ground up, starting with a blank sheet of paper.
Initially the business serviced clients in the accumulation phase, and had relatively few retirees. In 2010 Reed met a number of clients who had reached retirement with all of their financial goals met and in many cases comfortably exceeded, and discovered that even though they’d done that they were still unprepared for the transition from full-time work.
“None of them actually wanted to retire,” Reed said.
“Given that I’d actually spent a number of years getting their portfolios towards that financial objective, and in many cases those goals were surpassed, it made me look at our advice model. Realistically, they were not happy with what they were achieving.”
Reed found that many of his clients’ hopes and expectations about retirement didn’t relate to money at all, and were more focused on the retirement experience and how they would have liked to learn more abut what to expect, from people who had retired already.
“This got me to research further how we could enhance our value offering to clients – such as, how do I know what success is going to look like for retirees?” Reed said.
“They all know what they are retiring from but they do not necessarily know what they are retiring to.”
Resonates with clients
Reed has now created an approach to providing services to clients that is so well structured and resonates so well with his target market – even to the extent of servicing accumulation clients and retirement clients under different advice brand names (the other being Capricorn Financial Advisors) – that it cannot help but build trust.
“Rethinking the client experience is, I would suggest, a fundamental cause of why we’ve targeted our niche,” he says.
“When we look back at how we tripped over and built the business, I think the blank-sheet approach to identify the problem, opportunity and solution has been the secret of building the business to where we are today.”
Dr Rebecca Sheils, director of Beddoes Institute, which assesses financial planners and their businesses for inclusion in the Most Trusted Adviser network, says the practical experiences of Reed and Lourens support the findings of work that has been done into the key drivers of trust.
“The drivers from some trust modelling that we’ve done are, first, credibility – qualifications and experience and the whole credentialing exercise,” Sheils says.
“Consumers pay for advice and they pay to access your technical skills. That’s the reason they pay for advice. But then also it’s about the ‘intimacy’, or what we call the interpersonal skills, equally as much as the technical skills. And then there’s the service elements, which you have encapsulated as ‘reliability’.”
Credibility plus reliability plus intimacy – it’s a simple equation.
