Dealing with client complaints can be a tough job at the best of times, but it can be even worse if you don’t have a solid record-keeping policy.
Anand Srinivasan of Brisk Insurance, an insurance adviser who recently spoke at the FSC Get In Shape Summit, says he has personally dealt with situations where good record keeping saved him from what could otherwise have been a lengthy and difficult issue with a client. He says advisers should be recording every interaction with their clients, whether this is on paper, though recorded conversations or written notes.
“I think the fundamental truth is that you need to have good record keeping,” Srinivasan said. “That’s what I’ve learned, and it’s become pretty critical.”
“To give a real-life example, imagine a client calls you and says something like ‘I’d like to claim an income tax reduction for my income protection, could you provide me with a certificate?’
“It’s a pretty simple statement, and you could get that from the insurance company, but then if you have sold an agreed value contract and there’s a caveat that you can’t claim a reduction - how do you bring that across to the client?”
Srinivasan explained that when this situation occurred to him with a client, he was able to save himself a lot of pain simply through pulling up his records of conversations, and showing him signed agreements. He says very few people will remember details of conversations they’ve had months or years ago, and for an adviser, the value of having those conversations on record is huge when a complaint comes along.
“This happened to me with the financial controller of a company, who said “Well I don’t think this was explained to me properly, otherwise I wouldn’t have brought an agreed value contract.’ And lo and behold, all of a sudden everything is on your head to prove that you did have that conversation,” Srinivasan said.
“That’s when the notes and the correspondence become important. We’d had quite a few exchanges around forms of income protection, and also a note where we signed off around what the difference was between an agreed and indemnity contract, and he chose the agreed, and the signature was there in the document.
“I was able to ask him to have a read of that and tell me which part he didn’t understand, and he said ‘Thank you for reminding me, I now remember.’ So I basically saved myself a lot of trouble thanks to that record keeping, and what’s coming through again and again is that it’s not about the complaints - it’s about being very thorough with what you’re doing with the client.
“None of us will ever remember what we discussed four years back,” Srinivasan concluded. “Often it comes down to ‘you said, I said.’ The only way to avoid that is to make sure that every call, note or conversation with the client needs to be stored somewhere.”
