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October 06, 2002 at 08:00 PM
Pointers For Building Loyalty Among Your Annuity Clients
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In todays information-saturated world where well-informed, exceedingly fickle investors are proliferating faster than Intel can make processors, building loyalty among annuity customers is more important than ever.
In the annuity world in particular, where 1035 exchange activity has substantially increased over the past few years and negative net sales are on the rise, loyalty seems to be as lost as the second sock in the dryer. We wonder where it went.
Its a well-known fact that it costs more money–some say 10 times as much–to get a new client than to keep an existing one. And statistics everywhere confirm that its only a small fraction of customers who provide the bulk of returns and the largest share of profits in businesses today.
Needless to say, with shrinking profit margins and expense-control fever, no business can afford this dynamic for very long.
What can be done to keep clients from leaving? How can the industry build loyalty among annuity customers in this information-driven, super-accelerated world? Increasingly, producers are adopting a back-to-basics approach to client retention and relationship building.
1) Listen to your clients and anticipate their needs.
This is the foundation of developing a lasting broker/client relationship. Avoid falling into the trap of thinking of customers as a collection of names, numbers and dates on the computer screen. Instead, strive to treat them as if their objectives were your own.
The importance of this cannot be overemphasized. The more you listen to clients and identify with their goals, hopes, and dreams, the better youll be able to anticipate and provide for their present and future needs. Keep reminding yourself it could cost you as much as 10 times more money to find a new client.
2) Know your stuff.
With the rapid proliferation of technology and information sharing, contemporary annuity buyers are simply better educated and more sophisticated than ever before. That means you have to better educated and more sophisticated, too. Unfortunately, theres no magic bullet that can get you there. What you need to do is to learn your product line, inside and out.
