Things that irritate!: Making advisers’ lives easier

Now, if you’re not on this particular forum, it might surprise you to find that not every thread relates to lender-induced irritations. If anything – at least as it currently stands – there is a real mixture covering other parts of the process, with plenty about clients, particularly when it comes to the ability (or otherwise) to send in documentation in the right form, to distributors, to surveyors to the regulator.

All in one way or another are making the job difficult for advisers. Now, some might argue that it’s the job of the adviser to make sense of all this, to put right what is going wrong. After all, we talk a lot in this sector about consumers using advisers to take away the strain they might experience by attempting to secure their mortgage direct.

However, the way I look at it, there are elements to the advisory job that are always going to be challenging, and there are those which should not. For example, take clients, for example – can’t live with them, can’t live without them, might be a mantra that applies.

Each and every one is different and that is always going to be the case. For every client that may sail through the process like a dream, there is another that presents its own challenges. And I’m not talking about complicated needs or income, complex arrangements or specialist wants here, because again that is why they should be going to the adviser in the first place.

But more so around the way they engage and, for want of a better phrase, to do what they’re told. For example, the provision of documentation by clients is I know a considerable bug-bear for advisers who ask for those documents in a certain way or form, and find the client less than willing or able to deliver.

‘Please can you send documents to me like this please’ gets turned into, ‘All my documents are available on an app that you’ll need to sign-up for and get individual passwords to access’. Which might lead you to wonder why, if you can upload them all to this app, can’t you simply send them to me in the format I asked for?

And what about the client that needs constant attention, to whom everything is urgent, and who wants to have daily phone calls about the progression of their case. Again, it’s a regular occurrence, and one that advisers will have learnt how to manage but again it is time- and energy-consuming, and might definitely find its way into the box marked ‘irritating’.

I think as lenders we have to be more aware of this because there might be a temptation to think that the adviser’s first interaction with us on a case is the first interaction they have had full stop. Clearly, that’s not the case.

To get to the point where we are communicating may well have taken many days/weeks even, with many ongoing emails/calls, etc, with the client. The case that has appeared in our system that day or has been flagged with a telephone or field-based BDM may have been in the adviser’s system for quite a long time, and therefore what we should be doing is trying to make the rest of the process – specifically the interaction with us – as painless as possible.

How do we do that? Having open lines of communication is one part – access to a live chat with a human being on our website as perhaps a first port of call, or getting immediate certainty via direct contact with underwriters in terms of whether we’re able to offer on a case, rather than dragging it out for days. Not having advisers on hold to a telephone sales team for hours on end having to listen to James Blunt or whatever musak is being piped through would be another positive.

Then there’s the ability to turn around the documentation we receive as quickly as possible. It still amazes me that more lenders don’t post their current servicing timescales on their sites because this should also be factored into the decision an adviser is making. 24-hour reviews and same-day turnaround is a long way from ‘we’re not even looking at cases for 14 days’. It all has an impact, but advisers need to know what they are potentially walking into.

So, as lenders we have to acknowledge where we sit in the process and what we can do to make advisers’ lives easier when they do start to deal with us. There are so many moving pieces to the whole process that a super-smooth ride is often not achievable, but if we try to take care of our own part then hopefully, if there is a source of irritation, it’s not one emanating from the work we do.