Regular, proactive communication is about far more than keeping clients informed. Chris Ball, CEO of Hoxton Wealth, explains why staying visible between review meetings can strengthen trust, improve client retention and ultimately lead to more referrals.
There is a question I have started asking planners when I talk to them about their client relationships: how often does a client hear from you when there isn’t an urgent issue that you need to address with them.
And when I say that, I don’t mean the annual review or the email for a rule change on the tax side, I mean regular, unprompted contact.
For a lot of planners, the honest answer is: not very often and a lot of the time, the reasoning is understandable. If there is nothing pressing to say, why bother the client – no news is good news. The problem, is that this is not how a lot of clients feel about silence from their planner.
A client who has not heard from their planner in six months is not thinking “great, everything must be fine”, they are wondering whether they are important. The instinct to stay quiet when there is nothing important to report is well-intentioned, planners do not want to waste a client’s time or create unnecessary noise.
But, that instinct is based on a misunderstanding of what communication is actually for. Most planners treat it as a delivery mechanism, something you use to transmit information when information needs to be transmitted. That is a narrow way to think about it, because communication is also how relationships are maintained. And in its absence, relationships do not stay static, they erode.
There is a well-established principle in psychology called the Mere Exposure Effect. First identified by psychologist Robert Zajonc in the 1960s and replicated across hundreds of studies since, it describes a simple but powerful phenomenon: people develop preference and trust for things they encounter repeatedly. Familiarity builds fondness and fondness builds trust.
This applies to brands, to faces, and to the professionals we do business with. The more consistently a client hears from their planner, the more familiar, credible, and trustworthy that planner feels.
The implication for financial planning is significant. A planner who reaches out regularly, even with something small and low-stakes, is more than just being friendly, it has a meaningful psychological benefit. They are building the kind of familiarity that makes trust feel automatic.
The Mere Exposure Effect also works in reverse. Absence quietly does the opposite of presence, a client who has not heard from their planner in months does not stay at the same level of trust they were at when the relationship was active. That trust slowly fades, which means that every period of silence is costing planners something.
There is also a referral dimension worth discussing. Research on what drives client referrals consistently shows that an average level of trust does not produce them, high levels of trust do. And trust is not built through occasional brilliance, it is built through consistent presence over time.
A client who hears from you regularly has something concrete to say to a friend. They can tell them, for instance: my planner sent me a note last week about how the changes in the budget will affect our situation. That kind of proactive, personal contact is what turns a satisfied client into an advocate, it gives them a story to tell.
A client who only hears from their planner at the annual review has no equivalent story, they know the person they are woking with is competent. But competence alone does not generate referrals, trust generates referrals
Communication is the cheapest investment a planner can make in their practice, a phone call or short email costs nothing. A voice note takes two minutes, but compounded over years, the effect on retention and on referrals can be enormous
