Independent financial advisors often wear multiple hats – business owner, office support, administrator, marketer, etc. While this can be a point of pride that advisors can juggle so many things, it also means that they are not given the time to really work on customer service or their business.

There's no better time than now to double down on customer service. After all, advisors may be experiencing what they think is client satisfaction, but, as research shows, that may just be strong market performance. of 2024 JD Power US Full Service Satisfaction Survey showed a correlation between investor satisfaction and market performance, which proves that clients can be fickle, especially if their portfolio is not growing.

In the same survey, JD Power also found that 36% of millennials who have more than $1 million in investable assets will potentially leave their advisory firm within the next year. This is partly because 70% of these investors are already using a secondary investment firm. In these cases, whether advisors know it or not, they have been actively competing for their clients' business all along.

As the Great Wealth Transfer begins to occur, advisors must create processes that ensure an efficient and seamless client experience that pleases them. As an industry, we will only get one chance to get this massive asset move right, and no one wants to be on the wrong side of this equation.

Fear of client churn isn't the only reason advisors should think about which services to keep in-house. It should also be a matter of what they can do well enough. Most advisors do not have a marketing background or an in-depth knowledge of customer relationship management workflows. And that's good. But there comes a point in a firm's life cycle when it no longer makes sense for an advisor to be the firm's support, transition and client service specialist. It takes good business sense and courage to admit when you can't do everything, but when advisors do, it can pay dividends.

Take, for example, a consultant who has poor transition management skills. This presents an opportunity to hire an agency or use the partial services of a specialist so that the firm benefits from an optimal transition and the adviser who would otherwise have been tied up walking through this work is helping clients in instead.

There is a greater shortage of talented professionals able to assist advisors than in the past decade. The last McKinsey's American Opportunity Survey found that 36% of participants identify themselves as “freelancers,” otherwise known as “freelancers” or “part-timers.” This presents a great opportunity for advisors to enrich their firms with the talents of others.

At the end of the day, an increasing number of customers on the fence plus only 24 hours in a day equals the appropriate time to maximize time and ability to benefit the end customer.

Tara Victory is the Director of Business Development at ROZYRI