Beauty, they say is in the eye of the beholder. So, it seems is value.
There has been an interesting debate taking place on the subject of value amongst members of the financial services profession.
Media and regulatory focus tends to be on price but most people understand price in isolation doesn’t mean very much.
Our view at Informed Choice is that clients need to be able to form an opinion about whether the price for our services represents value for money, or not.
At least one commentator claims that we shouldn’t use the word “value” when we talk about what we do but instead should simply describe the “stuff that we do” and leave the consumer to make up their own minds about value.
I sort of understand what he means but our long experience of providing advice to clients surely enables us to decide if what we are doing is valuable or not?
And of course clients tell us it is so we simply reflect back what we are told.
Where we don’t think that we offer value for money we are quite prepared to say so – and often do.
A second commentator thinks that is all about the “experience.”
The client judges value for money based on the journey they go through with their adviser.
Such things I guess as responsiveness, clarity of explanation and basic things like actually doing what they say they are going to do.
But how do you know whether the experience is going to be good at the start of a client/adviser relationship? Well, you don’t of course.
So you could ask for a reference from other clients and that is not a bad thing to do at all.
The same commentator believes that value is a function of certainty of outcome.
Here I am less convinced that this is an easily measurable item.
We could be advising clients about events that are going to happen 20 years from now and thus the ability to predict an outcome is probably no more than a guess.
But a service that reviews performance to target every year along the way probably stands a better chance of hitting target. Experience might also might help to deliver confidence about outcome.
So when judging the value of what your adviser does best to base this on what they do rather than how they look.
