What the quality and quantity of meetings can mean for adviser-client relationships.
Is there a sweet spot for the cadence of client meetings?
From a numbers perspective, it may be necessary for an adviser to meet with a client only once a year to revise their plan based on any recent updates. But how about from a client’s perspective?
In past research, we have found a positive relationship between adviser-client interactions—whether that be a quick text message, email newsletter, or an in-person meeting—and adviser-client relationships. But does this finding hold for adviser-client meetings? And is there such a thing as too much?
We asked 399 current adviser clients how often they met with their financial advisers and how long their meetings usually take. We also asked these clients how satisfied they were with their advisers. Before we dive into the relationship between these variables, let’s take a look at the participants’ answers.
Most clients in our sample met with their advisers on a quarterly basis, but those who didn’t were fairly split between meeting more or less often. In other words, there is a wide range regarding meeting cadence, again signaling that advice on how often to meet with clients is mixed.
When we asked participants how long their meetings usually were, we again got a wide range of responses. Some clients seemed to meet with their advisers for quick 10-minute conversations, while others met for longer than an hour. The average meeting duration overall was 39 minutes.
When we looked at the relationship between satisfaction and cadence and satisfaction and duration, we found mixed results.
When it came to the relationship between satisfaction and duration, there really wasn’t much to write about. We found a correlation of just 0.19 between the two variables. These results suggest that how long an adviser meets with a client may not have too much of an impact on that client’s overall satisfaction regarding the relationship.
It also seems like meeting with clients every quarter may be enough for client satisfaction. Although we only found a modest correlation between cadence and satisfaction (r = 0.31), further regression analyses suggest that cadence may affect a person’s satisfaction nonlinearly. The following graph shows that satisfaction does increase the more often clients meet with their advisers, but average satisfaction plateaus after increasing to quarterly visits.
Our results from this simple analysis suggest a few key takeaways for advisers:
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