Client advisory board is a group of your most engaged clients appointed by you to give you a structured feedback to help you achieve your business goals. Just like companies appoint independent directors on their board, advisors can appoint, say, seven clients who will meet thrice or four times in a year to give them feedback.
Though an alien concept in the Indian financial advisory community, it is a well known practice internationally.
Currently, advisers rely on the informal and sporadic feedback from their clients to devise marketing strategies and communication. However, it may not prove to be effective all the time. A structured and specific feedback would help you devise your communication and strategies properly. A client advisory board becomes relevant in this context.
You may choose to appoint clients whom you consider are ‘most engaged’ and represent your ideal client profile to be a part of your board. However, a word of caution - the feedback received from the board, if it is strategic in nature, may go against your vision of the business. So, the first and most important step is to set the objective and agenda of your board meetings right.
Stephen Wershing, author of ‘Stop Asking for Referrals’ says that it is best to engage a third party facilitator to conduct such meetings. Internationally, there are agencies which facilitate and help advisers organise client advisory board meetings. According to Stephen, engaging a third party to conduct such meetings is effective since some clients may not want to express their concern or criticize you directly. Thus, engaging a third party brings neutrality to the whole process.
While engaging a third party entity to facilitate such meeting may not be feasible for all advisers, here are few tips to guide you to set up an advisory board.
- Shortlist a group of your most engaged and ideal client profile
- Try to appoint clients from different professions so that you can get varied perspectives
- Define the scope and objective of your board
- Keep the number of members limited; say seven to ten, which would again depend on the type of your organization
- Rotate the members every two or three years
- Ask more specific questions in your feedback
Getting feedback from an advisory board is found to offer several advantages to advisers, including getting referrals. It shows that you care about your clients and are willing to improve your services to meet their expectations.
So while advisers in India may find it initially difficult to get their clients to be a part of such initiative and the process could consume time, money and resources but the concept is worth exploring.
