Training Calls from Hades
July 30, 2010To understand the types of calls we receive on the financial helpline, new-to-the-firm CFP’s (not the same as new CFP’s – every planner here at Financial Finesse has at least a decade of experience in financial planning) listen to a lot of recorded conversations with our partner firms. Some of the biggest names in the S&P are our clients, or partners. Their employees call our team of financial planners on topics ranging from consideration of bankruptcy & mortgage foreclosure through how to handle the tax treatment of a sophisticated international investment or deal with how to reduce taxes on a very large estate. When the phone rings, we don’t know if you are teetering on the brink of financial disaster or if you are dealing with complex tax issues. Every call is unique. There is no “typical” caller. I think that it’s good to be a little schizophrenic to work on our helpline, but that may just be the voices in my head talking ….
Anyway, as a big part of our training we listen to hours and hours of calls to understand the issues that we deal with on a regular basis, to hear how our seasoned planners subtly coach the callers without making decisions for them, and deal with the emotional side of a caller’s situation. Many callers are in a state of mind that does not allow them to think clearly, either because of distress (foreclosure, bankruptcy, severe credit issues, etc.) or euphoria & confusion (estate tax issues, stock option planning, inheritance, etc.). In order to make progress with the caller’s financial situation, the emotional side must be handled first.
After we listen to hours of calls, our more tenured get to torture the new planners. OK, torture may be a bit too harsh. It’s called training when you are a tenured planner, it’s called hazing, torture, or calls from Hades (or something like that) when you are the newbie. Whether it’s adapting to someone who just wants answers ASAP, if not sooner, or someone calling in tears, the planners always have a few tricks up their sleeves for us new kids on the block (even when we’re not exactly kids). The amazing part – they are all using a call that came into the helpline recently and that they had to handle personally. It’s a 2-fold training! New folks get to handle a call that we will inevitably take in real life, but we get to make mistakes in the context of training and with fellow employees. The tenured planners use these training calls to improve their skills and see if a new person, with a perspective as an “outsider,” does something in the call that they wish they had done with the benefit of hindsight. It’s a brilliant way to train both the caller and the new employee.
As my friend Nancy said in her July 12th blog post “When Good Is Not Good Enough” – good isn’t good enough. Training never stops around here. Even when you’re training “the new guy” – me in this case – the learning never stops. I don’t know how we got to this point with training, but it’s one of my goals to find out shortly how we evolved into this process. It is why on a scale of 1 to 5, where most people would be thrilled with a 4, the planners at Financial Finesse are bummed when they get a 4.7 or 4.8. They wonder what they could have done to get that last .2 or .3. Where did we fall short? What could we have done better? And, that becomes the basis for the next training call.
It feels like hazing. It feels like torture. But, when the real calls started coming in, I had the tools to handle some pretty tough calls. In my 2nd week after training, I had a call from a woman who was evicted from her apartment and was living in her car with her young son, and I helped her plan a path back to having a safe place to raise her son – which was my toughest call in real life, but a training call during my 6 weeks of training prepared me very well to handle this caller. By the time we ended the call, we had developed 3 or 4 strategies that should help her regain her footing financially and had a resource to help her find temporary shelter for her family.
Without our very demanding training calls, I would have been stupefied by her call and would not have known what to do. It would have been a train wreck and my scores would have reflected that. I was never happy when I had a series of training calls on my calendar, but in hindsight that is what gave me the skills and confidence to handle virtually any situation that comes up on the helpline.