You will be able to name the sales habits most likely to lead to a complaint and the fix for each.
A client messages you late on a Sunday. Her claim for a minor surgery has been turned down because of a waiting period, and she says you never mentioned one. She is angry, and she wants to know what you are going to do about it. Your first instinct is to reply with the clause number. That is the instinct this lesson is about.
Most complaints in this industry are not about fraud or obvious wrongdoing. They come from a gap between what the client thought they bought and what the policy actually says. The client believed a plan covered hospital stays when it covered critical illness. They thought premiums were fixed when they could be revised. They expected to get their money back if they cancelled, and the surrender value was a fraction of what they paid.
Those gaps are usually made at the point of sale. The representative described the best case and moved quickly past the rest, or used a term the client misread, or let a comparison with another product hang in the air without correcting it. Lesson 2.3, Clear, relevant and timely information, covered how to close those gaps before the client signs. This lesson looks at the habits that open them.
Some habits are easy to spot in other people and hard to see in yourself. Four come up again and again.
The first is selling to a campaign. Your firm or a product provider runs a contest, a target or an incentive for a particular product this quarter. Nothing about the client has changed, but that product starts appearing in more of your recommendations. Clients often sense this even when they cannot name it. The recommendation feels slightly off, and that unease is what turns a later disappointment into a complaint.
The second is rushing the end of the meeting. The fact-find took longer than planned, the client has to leave, and the disclosure gets compressed into five minutes. The parts you skip are usually the exclusions, the charges and the early exit terms, which are exactly what the complaint will be about.
The third is overstating. "You'll definitely get this back." "This fund has always done well." "Claims for this are never a problem." None of those can be promised, and any of them can become the sentence a client quotes back to you.
The fourth is leaving out a conflict. If you are paid more for one product than another, or a recommendation would help you reach a target, the client is entitled to wonder about it. Your firm will have rules on how pay is disclosed. Follow them, and do not let a target decide a recommendation in the first place.
The fix for each is a replacement habit, not a promise to try harder. Instead of selling to a campaign, check whether the campaign product would have come up if the campaign did not exist. Instead of rushing, book a second meeting for disclosure when the first runs long. Instead of overstating, describe ranges and conditions. Instead of hiding conflicts, answer questions about pay openly and in line with your firm's process.
However careful you are, some clients will complain, and how you respond matters as much as what happened.
Start by listening to the whole thing without defending yourself. Then acknowledge that the client is upset and that you are taking it seriously. Write down what they said, in their words, with the date and time. Then pass it to your firm's complaints process, the same day if you can.
What you should not do is argue it away. Telling the client they signed the form, or quoting the clause back at them, may be accurate, but it does not resolve anything, and it can turn a complaint about a product into a complaint about you. Nor should you try to settle it privately, for example by offering to make up the difference yourself. Your firm has a complaints process so that complaints are handled independently, which is what the fifth fair dealing outcome expects, and that means not by the person whose work is being questioned.
For the client with the waiting period, the reply could be: "I'm sorry this has happened, and I want to make sure it's looked at properly. I've noted what you've told me and I'm passing it to our complaints team today. They'll contact you, and I'll make sure you know what to expect."
Clients who are not satisfied with how a firm has handled their complaint have somewhere else to go. Some disputes can be taken to FIDReC, the Financial Industry Disputes Resolution Centre, which offers mediation and adjudication between consumers and financial institutions. FIDReC sets out which disputes it can hear and its current limits and process on its own website, so point clients there rather than describing the details from memory. Your firm's final response to a complaint will normally tell the client about this option.
Knowing that FIDReC exists is useful for one more reason. It reminds you that every complaint might one day be read by someone independent, alongside your file. That is a good test of whether your notes would show what you actually said.
You have probably already seen some of these habits in action, whether in your own firm, a previous job or as a customer yourself. In the activity below you name three you have seen in your industry and write the habit you would put in place of each one.
List three sales habits you have seen in your industry that work against the outcomes and write the replacement habit for each.
Junxiong-WFG Organisation is an authorised representative of AIA Financial Advisers Private Limited (Reg. No. 201715016G).