Previously, when financial advisors or teams liked, reposted, responded to, or solicited reviews, they became entangled and/or adopted these reviews. This meant financial advisors were responsible for the accuracy of the review. As a result, very few wealth management teams allowed financial advisors to engage with reviews. Now, that's changing.
There are four main strategies for managing reviews. (You don't have to do them all, so work with your compliance and business partners to evaluate and prioritize these use cases.)
1. Review Monitoring (low risk and effort) - You can pull in reviews from the internet to understand your reputation, gain valuable insights, and use these insights to optimize your business and mitigate risk. Monitoring was allowed before and after the new SEC law, and it's something all teams should be doing.
Key Decisions:
Monitor 3rd Party Reviews on Google, Facebook, etc.
Build reputation management reports for individual FAs, Teams, Complex-Heads, Territories, and Service lines (ex. Wealth Management)
Enable Sentiment Analysis reports to understand insights at scale. (ex. positive or negative comments, service vs sales, etc.)
Setup specialized notifications to compliance teams? (ex. Guaranteed best performance)
Setup Competitive intelligence to understand how you compare to local competitors
2. Review Generation (medium risk and effort) - The solicitation of reviews is usually conducted via email or SMS, but often clients can generate reviews in a QR code within print material or within their self-service customer portal. Remember people that generate reviews improve their star rating by 1.1 stars.*
Key Decisions:
Select the appropriate channels to solicit reviews from customers. Often clients start with email, then expand to other channels - email, sms, print, online portals, and financial advisor pages
Which financial professionals would you like to include in the program?
Who can solicit a review? The financial advisor, marketing, or do you want them to be automated triggers (ex. Annual Client Performance Reviews).
What disclaimers do you want to include in the solicitation process (ex. Is a client, compensation, and conflict of interest)?
Do you generate reviews from just clients or prospects too?
The quarantine period can be adjusted to fit your needs
3. Review Response (medium risk and effort) - The ability to respond to customer reviews in a timely manner. Responding to reviews can increase review ratings by .33 stars.*
Key Decisions:
Who can respond to reviews? financial advisors, marketing, compliance, etc
How quickly should you respond to reviews?
What type of reviews or percentage of reviews should a firm respond to?
What method do I want to use to respond to reviews?
Custom Responses - responder can craft any message but it will have the proper controls and supervision
Pre-approved Responses - responder can choose from a list of preapproved responses
Intelligent Responses - AI-assisted review response
- Define user controls and workflows required to manage the process
4. Review Marketing (medium risk and low effort) - Leverage reviews to build trust signals for customers, prospects and online search engines. Remember, customers with 4-5 stars have a 45% improvement in organic search.
Key Discussions:
Display aggregate reviews on the branch pages or financial professional pages (ex. 4.7/5 stars out of 2,303 reviews for Joan Smith)
Display individual reviews with star ratings, comments, and disclaimers
Use reviews or endorsements in print material
Use reviews in broader marketing campaigns (ex. email, ads, etc.)