Review real or practice meetings against the five outcomes and find your weakest one.
Wei Ling (an invented example) is a representative who scored five of her own client meetings from one month against the five fair dealing outcomes. Before she started, she would have named culture as her weakest outcome because she felt awkward whenever a campaign was running, and her notes showed that guess was wrong.
Most representatives can quickly name the outcome they think they are weakest on. The guess is usually the one they find least comfortable, such as talking about charges. When they check their notes, the real gap is often somewhere else, and often in a part of the meeting they thought went well. The scoring sheet replaces that feeling with evidence, and it takes about half an hour if you have your notes to hand.
Draw a grid with the five outcomes MAS sets for firms as the rows, taken from Lesson 2.1, "The five outcomes MAS expects firms to deliver". Write them in your own short wording: fair dealing culture, suitable products, competent representatives, clear information and fair complaint handling.
The columns are your last five client meetings, each labelled with the date and the client's initials. If you are not yet a representative, use five practice meetings from role-plays, or five meetings you observed and took notes on.
Add a sixth column on the right headed "evidence count", which you fill in at the end. The evidence count is the number of cells in a row that hold written evidence.
You don't fully control the culture and complaints rows, so score them differently. For culture, score whether you did anything in the meeting that reflected a fair dealing culture, for example declining to mention a campaign product that did not fit the client. For complaints, score whether any concern the client raised was recorded and, if it was a complaint, passed on. If no concern came up in a meeting, write "n/a" in that cell instead of leaving it blank, so it is not confused with a missing record.
Take one meeting at a time, open your notes and the client file, and score from those instead of from memory. In each cell, write a few words of evidence instead of a tick, because a tick is too easy to give yourself. Evidence looks like this:
Suitable products: fact-find shows no dependants, so no life cover recommended. Clear information: client's own summary of the policy recorded. Competent representatives: rationale links premium to cash flow surplus.
If the evidence is not in the notes, the cell stays empty, even if you are sure you did it. This is a deliberate blank: a cell left empty because no written evidence exists. A reviewer reading the file has only what is written down, as Module 5 shows. If you explained the exclusions carefully but wrote nothing, the file looks the same to a reviewer as a meeting where the exclusions were skipped.
Be strict about dates. Notes written a week later from memory are weaker evidence than notes made on the day, so mark any cell that rests on late notes as weaker evidence.
When every cell is either 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. Don't average across rows or weight them, because the only aim is to find where your written evidence is thinnest.
Wei Ling's counts for the month came out like this. For suitable products she had evidence in all five meetings, 5 of 5, because she always records why a product fits, partly because her firm's form forces it. Competent representatives was 4 of 5: one meeting, a top-up for an existing client, has a recommendation with no written rationale, and although she remembers her reasoning, the file does not show it.
Clear information surprised her. She explains products carefully and thought this was her strongest outcome, but it scored 2 of 5. Two files record the client saying back what they bought, and the other three have only a signature on the disclosure form, which on its own does not count as evidence that the client understood.
Culture was 3 of 5: three meetings' notes mention a product she chose not to raise and why, and the other two have nothing either way. For complaints, one client raised a concern about a premium increase, which was noted and passed on, so that row is 1 of 1, with the other four meetings marked n/a.
Her weakest row by count is clear information, with 2, while culture, the outcome she would have guessed, scored 3.
Pick one habit to change, aimed at your weakest row, and make it small and concrete enough that you will know afterwards whether you did it. One habit is enough. If you try to fix all five rows at once, none of the changes stick and you end up back where you started.
Wei Ling chose this: at the end of every recommendation meeting, she asks the client to explain the product back in their own words, the technique from Lesson 2.3, "Clear, relevant and timely information", and writes their answer in the notes before leaving the room. She added it as the last item on her meeting checklist so she cannot forget it on a busy day.
A finished sheet has five rows and five columns, with each cell holding either a few words of evidence or a deliberate blank, and an evidence count for each row. Below the grid, write one sentence naming your weakest outcome and one sentence naming the habit you will change in your next three meetings.
Keep the sheet, because when you repeat the exercise in a few months, the count in your weakest row should have gone up.
For the activity below, fill in the scoring sheet for your own five meetings and write down the one habit you'll change.
Fill in the fair dealing scoring sheet for five meetings, then write down the one habit you will change next.
Junxiong-WFG Organisation is an authorised representative of AIA Financial Advisers Private Limited (Reg. No. 201715016G).