In her latest cashflow clinic article for Professional Paraplanner, Steph Willcox, head actuary at Dynamic Planner, considers how to ensure that clients are receiving the most value from your services when looking at their cash flow report.
My monthly column has previously addressed how to use cash flow to generate value for your clients in all types of situations, however once the plan is completed it will often not be reviewed for another year.
Even though a client may not see an updated cash flow report, they will probably be able to look back on a report that you have created for them to take away – either as a hard copy, or digitally to download or view at their convenience. As a result, we should ensure that the reports that we produce allow clients to understand their financial plan even when they are looking months later, away from support provided by advisers or paraplanners.
Today, I’ll look at how these reports can be tailored to the clients you have, and how to ensure that they are receiving the most value from your services when looking at their cash flow report.
Tailoring the look and feel of the report
We focus on the content of the report for our clients, but the look and feel of the report can be just as important to the client’s experience of the financial advice process.
When creating a cash flow report, it’s vital to consider if the client is vulnerable, or has additional needs, including accessibility issues. A client with these characteristics may receive and process information in a unique way, and so the report they receive should be constructed with this in mind.
Even if a client has not been marked as vulnerable, they may still be experiencing vulnerability characteristics, even in the short term, which you should be considering in their reports.
Vulnerable characteristics could be straightforward to deal with – colour-blindness can be addressed by ensuring the colour palette you are using is colour-blind friendly – but other characteristics can be more challenging.
In general, we need to ensure that the report is easy to read. You can check the reading-age of your report through Word (available as “Document stats” under spelling and grammar) and you should try to reduce the reading-age of your document as much as possible.
Reducing the number of words in each sentence, and the number of syllables in each word reduces the reading-age of your document. We reduced the reading-age of our standard Cash flow report by over five years by refining the language used and redesigning the report itself.
Reviewing how your report is processed by screen readers can also be very important. Providing descriptions of images will allow people with visual impairments to receive the full benefit of the report and allow the screen reader to interpret what is being shown to your clients.
Your clients may also not be computer literate, or struggle to work digitally. In these instances, you can ensure that they receive a hard copy of their report to review in person, rather than through a screen.
Tailoring the content of the report
More familiar ground is likely to be tailoring each client’s report to give them a personalised experience.
Interactions with clients can give you valuable insights into their characteristics and can help you to tailor the wording you use, as well as the financial plan you present.
Attitude to Risk Questionnaires can give you more insight than simply a risk profile for a client, it can offer insights into things like a client’s preference for certainty, emotion towards taking risk or their tolerance of uncertainty, amongst other things.
Knowing these things about your client can help you to use your reports to help coach your clients. You may be able to help reinforce good behaviours like saving more, or taking appropriate levels of risk, so that future outcomes are improved. You can also show the impact of decisions that can be made today to help generate interest and buy-in from your clients.
If you know that the client is intolerant of uncertainty – either because of ATR insights, or because you have experienced how they have reacted to volatility within their investment portfolio previously – you can use the report to focus on the certainty of outcomes, or the long term expectations even through short term volatility.
Even a long-term client, with predictable and understandable characteristics, may surprise you when it comes to retirement. Clients may have very particular preferences when it comes to how they receive income in retirement and so it will be important to show scenarios that the client is interested in or are important to them.
There’s no value for the client if you spend time on scenarios or reporting that a client is not interested in reading and is therefore not a sensible way to spend your time.
It’s particularly important to recognise where a client is being asked to make a choice so that you can show both options in a report for them to consider clearly. A comparison of both scenarios can help to bring the choices to life and make decision making easier.
Summary
We all want to provide our clients with value, and taking a fresh look at how you create reports can be an effective way of increasing the value of financial advice.
By taking the look, feel and content of the report into consideration you can create a truly personalised report, adding value to your clients’ lives every year.