You will review real or practice meetings against the five outcomes and find your weakest one.
Ask most representatives which fair dealing outcome they are weakest on and they will answer quickly. Usually it is the one they find least comfortable, such as talking about charges. Then you look at their notes and find the real gap is somewhere else entirely, often in a part of the meeting they thought went well. This exercise replaces that feeling with evidence.
You will score five meetings against the five outcomes using only what your notes show, then pick one habit to change. With your notes to hand, it takes about half an hour.
Draw a grid. The rows are the five outcomes from lesson 2.1, The five outcomes MAS expects firms to deliver, in your own short wording: fair dealing culture, suitable products, quality advice, clear information and fair complaint handling. The columns are your last five client meetings, labelled with a date and the client's initials. If you are not yet a representative, use five practice meetings from role-plays, or meetings you observed and took notes on.
Add a sixth column on the right headed "evidence count". You will fill that in at the end.
Two rows need a word of explanation, because you do not control them fully. For culture, score whether you did anything in the meeting that reflected it, such as declining to mention a campaign product that did not fit. For complaints, score whether any concern the client raised was recorded and, if it was a complaint, passed on. If no concern came up, mark the cell "n/a" rather than leaving it blank.
Now take each meeting in turn, open your notes and the file, and fill in each cell with the evidence you can find. A tick is too easy to give yourself, so write a few words instead. For suitable products, the evidence might be "fact-find shows no dependants, so no life cover recommended". For clear information, it might be "client's own summary of the policy recorded". For quality advice, "rationale links premium to cash flow surplus".
If the evidence is not in your notes, the cell stays empty, even if you are sure you did it, because a reviewer reading your file, as you will see in module 5, has only what is written down. A meeting where you explained the exclusions carefully, but wrote nothing about it, looks the same to them as a meeting where you skipped them.
Be strict with yourself on dates too. Notes written a week later and filled in from memory are weaker evidence than notes made on the day, and you should mark them as such.
When every cell is filled or left empty, count the cells with evidence in each row and write the number in the evidence count column. The row with the lowest count is your weakest outcome, at least as far as anyone outside the room could tell.
Do not average across rows or weight them. You are looking for one thing: where the written evidence is thinnest.
Here is Wei Ling's sheet for five meetings in one month, described row by row. The meetings and counts are examples.
Suitable products: evidence in 5 of 5 meetings. She always records why a product fits, partly because her firm's form forces it.
Quality advice: 4 of 5. One meeting, a top-up for an existing client, has a recommendation with no rationale written down. She remembers the reasoning, but the file does not show it.
Clear information: 2 of 5. This surprised her. She explains products carefully, and she thought this was her strongest outcome. But only two of the five files record the client saying back what they bought. In the other three, the only evidence of understanding is a signature on the disclosure form.
Culture: 3 of 5. In three meetings her notes mention a product she chose not to raise, and why. In two there is nothing either way.
Complaints: 1 of 1, with four meetings marked n/a. One client raised a concern about a premium increase, and it was noted and passed on.
Her weakest row by evidence is clear information. Before she started, she would have named culture, because she felt awkward whenever a campaign was running, and the sheet showed her that guess was wrong.
Pick a single habit to change in your next three meetings, aimed at the weakest row. Make it small and concrete enough that you will know whether you did it.
Wei Ling's change: at the end of every recommendation meeting, ask the client to explain the product back in their own words, as in lesson 2.3, Clear, relevant and timely information, and write their answer in the notes before she leaves the room. She adds it as the last item on her meeting checklist so she cannot forget it on a busy day.
One habit is enough. If you try to fix all five rows at once, none of the changes will stick, and you will be back where you started.
A finished sheet has five rows and five columns, each cell holding either a few words of evidence or a deliberate blank, plus an evidence count per row. Below the grid is one sentence naming your weakest outcome and one sentence naming the habit you will change in your next three meetings.
Keep the sheet. When you repeat this in a few months, you should see the count in that row go up. The activity below asks you to complete the scoring sheet for your own five meetings and write that one habit.
Complete the fair dealing scoring sheet for five meetings and write the one habit you will change next.
Junxiong-WFG Organisation is an authorised representative of AIA Financial Advisers Private Limited (Reg. No. 201715016G).