Striking the Right Balance in Client Follow-Ups for Mortgage and Protection Advisers
The mortgage and protection advice journey is a collaborative effort between advisers and their clients. Brokers provide the necessary guidance and advice, while clients must supply the documents and information needed to advance their applications, either via email or through a client portal. Navigating the tightrope between persistence and pressure is crucial for mortgage and protection advisers when following up with clients.
The Follow-Up Challenge
You've connected with a lead, discussed their mortgage and protection needs, and they've shown interest in proceeding with your services. The next step is for them to send over essential documents and information so that you can begin research on the appropriate product for them.
A few days pass without word from the client. It's tempting to assume they're simply caught up at work. As more time slips by, you decide to follow up with a call or email, which often goes ignored. You wait a few more days and then send one final reminder and then wait in hope of a reply, which may never come.
Many advisers struggle with follow-up, concerned that persistence may damage the relationship if they catch the client at a particularly busy time.
And it’s easy to convince yourself that not following up is the best course of action: Perhaps the client is simply overwhelmed and hasn't had the chance to send the requested information, perhaps it was the next thing on their to-do-list and they don’t need reminding at all!
The Power of Persistence
Across wide range of scenarios, follow ups or “nudges” have been shown to be extremely powerful in influencing behaviour. For example, text reminders to patients have dramatically reduced no-show rates at medical appointments.
Nudging your clients to do the necessary tasks to continue their advice journey, can have a significant impact on your mortgage and protection business. By regularly following up with your clients, you could significantly reduce the number of prospects that fail to reach the application stage.
However, it can be a significant time burden on advisers to manually follow up with clients via phone calls or emails. Advisers will often need to create a system to keep track of when clients have last been chased, in order to schedule their next reminder.
This task can (rightly) seem lower priority vs. advising clients and progressing cases with higher probability of completion, where clients have been more proactive in completing tasks. However, you could be missing out on a number of additional cases already in your grasp.
The Efficiency of Automated Reminders
Professionals across a wide range of industries (not just mortgage and protection advisers) are increasingly using automatic reminders to nudge clients towards action in a non-intrusive and time efficient way. For example, e-signing software companies like DocuSign include as standard the ability to send automated reminders to signing parties.
These automatic reminders can be a useful addition to your follow up strategy and are often used in conjunction with other methods, for example phone calls for clients who have not taken any action after a couple of reminders.
Keychain’s mortgage and protection client portal allows advisors to set up these automated reminders in seconds, with the ability to customise frequency and number of reminders for individual clients. Follow ups are “smart” and adjust depending on what tasks have been completed by the client. This ultimately means that mortgage and protection advisers spend far less time chasing clients, while dramatically improving key business metrics such as their lead to offer conversion rate.
Automatic reminders are just one of the ways that mortgage and protection advisors can improve their client processes, check out this article for other top tips.
About Keychain
Keychain is an all-encompassing client portal tailored for mortgage and protection advisers. It enhances client and adviser interactions by offering digital fact-finding, secure document sharing, e-signatures, and automated reminders. Book a demo of the platform here.
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