Expert Financial Advisor Or Financial Adviser? Playing Games With Insurance Customer Clients

For the last 10 years insurance customer clients have wondered if a financial advisor or financial adviser before them is an expert or a fake. Find out how to tell the expert financial adviser from the insurance agent fake. It is like being operated on by a meat butcher instead of a certified surgeon.

The doctor shortage could end in a hurry if after a very brief training, new hired by want ad "doctors" were given a waiting room of patients to practice whatever skills they had learned. Moreover, management told them yes you are a doctor, so they do not hesitate in performing their duties. Locally there would be very few return visits from customer clients, and hardly any would be completely confident in following the new doctor's advice. Nationally you would have medical security in a state of turmoil, and irate professional doctors and surgeons.

Well this is a real life game being played out with unaware insurance customer clients thinking they are planning their financial future with expert financial advisors or financial representatives. Hundreds of thousands of dollars of a clients personal financial assets could change directions due to the advice of a new financial adviser. Did this new customer just have financial surgery from an expert of at least 5 years or a new trainee of a couple of months? They can both wear identical suits, have identical haircuts, and have business cards with just about the same wording. Financial advisor, adviser, consultant, representative, specialist, analyst, sales representative, guide, producer, or what. Pick you name title.

IS THIS FAIR TO AN INSURANCE CUSTOMER, CLIENT, OR EVEN PROSPECT?

Do not expect the major life insurance companies to be of any assistance. In fact they are the cause for much of this name title confusion. They started the name game. Sudden agents that passed their life insurance exam and worked for a life insurance company were no longer called life insurance agents. Instead they were financial representatives and financial agents, immediately capable of providing financial advice as an advisor. Sometimes in a hospital in might be hard to tell a registered nurse from an LPN. Here it like walking into a field of active sheep and seeing which ones still have immature pink pimples on their butts. I wish all insurance agents well, but I personally would not want a rookie just scraping by on paying bills to give advice and make decisions on my lifetime accumulated assets. The rookie has to make a sale(s), good or bad.

The REAL Financial Advisor

One this is for certain, he or she are not a naive captive insurance agent that does not know the difference between an insurance suspect, prospect, or client. If this adviser has 5 years experience currently, there is an ongoing continuing education in financial issues slated for the life of the career. Knowledge is a never ending process. Along the way certifications like CLU, CHfC, CFP, RFP, and dozens of new ones are available for the learning. Even though giving financial advice requires being quite a perfectionist on uncovering a wide spectrum of products, the real financial advisor has substantial errors and omission insurance. The majority of true insurance financial advisors are proud to be independent. This allows offering a variety of producers from a range of different insurance carriers.

FINANCIAL PRISON?

It would be easy if all so called financial representative under 4 years experience were required to wear a prison striped suit so they could not fool customers and clients with a good con line. Since the big union of old insurance companies hiring these "non-insurance" agents would be ready to have their lobbyists attack the white house, a different method would have to be used. My suggestion is a very simple one and would still avoid the suddenly lower-class name of insurance agent, plus it would be easy to enforce. Since no one but an out of space alien knows the difference between the word advisor and adviser, here is the solution. All real financial advisors with at least 4 years experience and one earned designation would retain that name. All the rookies with stars in their eyes and holes in their wallets would be called advisers.

No more deceptive name games please.

Well published author, Don Yerke likes to concentrate on what you don't know or what no one else dares to print. Tell it like it is.

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The website address is [http://www.agentsinsurancemarketing.com]

Specialty Produce Wholesaler Frieda's Sets the Standard With Customer Service That Goes the Distance

As a teenager, Karen Caplan and her sister Jackie learned about customer service the old-fashioned way. They spent weekends in the offices of Frieda's, their mother's specialty produce business, answering customer inquiries and sending recipes on how to prepare the company's exotic fruits and vegetables. Frieda Caplan had encouraged shoppers to ask questions and request free recipes at a time when no one else was doing it.

Nearly three decades later, Karen Caplan, now president and CEO of the Los Alamitos, Calif., company, and VP Jackie Caplan Wiggins continue to set trends in customer satisfaction.

Frieda's, which last year did $35 million in business selling everything from sweet dumpling squash to morel mushrooms, is the nation's largest wholesaler of specialty produce, exotic fruits and other foods. And it has honed customer satisfaction and education to a fine art. At a time when analysts and customers lament often slow corporate responses to consumer e-mails, Frieda's fields up to 500 queries week (most of them e-mails), typically replying within a day of receipt. And while other companies have been criticized for "dumb sizing" -- downsizing without regard to customer service or product quality - Frieda's continues to focus on making customers happy. It's a strategy that has helped build customer loyalty and push revenues higher each year in recent times.

"Twenty-eight years ago, no one was doing customer service. If you wanted a recipe or a refund, they'd tell you to expect to wait six to eight weeks," says Karen Caplan, whose company was also the first in the specialty-produce industry to offer full retail refunds to unhappy customers, and within a week. "Today, I'm relentless about customer service."

Give Customers More Than They Expect
Frieda's was among the first to include product descriptions, usage, handling tips, country of origin, complete nutritional information on its labels. And if that weren't enough, Frieda's assigns three employees to answer the dozens of questions that arrive daily, such as:

"Can I freeze my yakisoba noodles?"

"What's the best way to store horseradish?"

"Can I grow elephant garlic from the bulb I bought?"

Other customers simply want a recipe for the dried chipotle peppers they purchased, or have an occasional gripe, says director of communications Tristan Millar, who oversees customer satisfaction. The company lists recipes and product tips on all its labels, as well as its phone number, address and e-mail address, urging buyers to request refunds if unhappy.

Giving consumers a quick turnaround is the key to keeping them happy. Even on weekends, Millar checks her e-mail for customer queries. And the staff is especially diligent before Thanksgiving, because they know buyers will want tips on how to make the most of their holiday produce. Indeed, it's an attitude more companies should adopt, says a study by Jupiter Communications, which says 46 percent of online businesses take five or more days to respond to e-mails, or don't respond at all, collectively losing millions of dollars. Many sites don't bother to list a customer service e-mail address.

To ease the job, Frieda's has set up its own resource library containing books and publications on just about every fruit, vegetable and exotic food the company could find. So when an e-mail asks about unusual uses of various melons, dried fruits or other products, employees can find a solution and fire off a quick answer. They then stash the information in a special binder, because inevitably, someone else will ask the same question.

How can a company of 160 employees that sells its products to retail grocery chains afford to lavish such attention on individual consumers?

Over the past five years, the privately held company's revenue has grown from about $23 million to $35 million annually. It's difficult to peg how much customer service has played in the growth. But Caplan says that Frieda's refund policy -- unique within the produce industry -- says it all.

"In the past year I can tell you we've refunded less than $1,000, which tells you something about our quality," she says. To keep customers happy and complaints low, the company spends about $200,000 each year in employee time to field consumer requests. The results easily justify the expense, says Caplan, who believes the outreach helps build relationships and trust with end users.

"We have some customers who send the refund checks back to us," says Caplan. "Many have been customers for years and feel they have a relationship with our company. They just wanted to let us know that maybe some items were stuck together in the package."

Pick Employees Ripe for the job
The focus on customer satisfaction begins with the company's culture. Caplan and her clan pick employees with the same care it might select a good pepino melon.

"Make sure the people who are dealing with your customers are passionate about the product. Before they're hired, they have to give us the impression of being very customer- service oriented. You can't come in with a clerical mentality," she says. "They have to show a passion for food or customer service."

Frieda's builds on that natural interest by immersing employees in lore about the 500 specialty products it sells. Workers spend the first weeks of employment learning about products in the company's 81,000-square-foot warehouse in the Los Angeles suburb. They are encouraged to take products home and use them in their own cooking and recipes.

Training and education are the key to sparking workers' passion, Caplan says. Many companies are reluctant to shell out for such training, but it has been well worth it for Frieda's. "Some things you have to do on blind faith, just knowing that you're doing something positive for (employees) and they will do something positive for someone else," she says.

So when someone writes or calls with a question like, "How do I cook a squash?" employees know the answer, because it's part of their training. Caplan makes a point of reading every snail-mail letter herself, to keep taking the pulse of what customers want. In the end, she says, "If you aren't passionate about your products, don't expect customers to be."

By Lisa Plendl

Lisa Plendl is a highly seasoned small business copywriter. She provides marketing writing customized for small businesses, including Web copy, brochures, sales sheets, business letters, scripts, articles, and other collateral that drives traffic and gets results.

Small Business and Technology Writer