First Impressions

August 06, 2010

During my first week with Financial Finesse I spent most of my time in training, monitoring calls on the helpline, and trying to remember the names of my new coworkers.  I am not quite sure what I expected out of the calls into our Financial Helpline, but I was definitely surprised.  I thought maybe there might be more questions on investing and taxes, which was the norm before I joined the Financial Finesse team.  What I didn’t expect was the outpouring of emotion from the callers. Many of the callers I listened to sounded like they were on the verge of tears, under WAY MORE financial stress than I was accustomed to seeing, and it seemed like they saw their situation as hopeless.  Calling the helpline was a means of last resort, at least that’s the way I saw it.

They needed to be sort of “talked off the window ledge” before our planners were able to even talk about next steps or resources to help them. Without getting too specific, one caller said she had her wages attached due to a 10 year old debt that she thought was closed, over, done and forgotten.  The attached wages (she got a court summons, disregarded it and lost the case!) made her fall well short of being able to pay her rent and she and her three kids were about to be evicted.  She sounded hopeless and lost.

What surprised me most about the first week is the ability of our financial planners to take a situation like this and turn it into a productive situation where the caller had some very specific “to do” items at the end of the call.  The first few minutes of these calls were far more about psychology, defusing a situation, talking the caller back into a rational place (the callers wouldn’t have been able to hear any advice when they were so emotionally charged while describing their situations), and quickly understanding the issue creating extreme duress than it was about the fundamentals of financial planning.  In my head I saw scenes from hospital emergency rooms, but instead of blood it was emotions & stress that our “financial doctors” had to deal with.  I walked back to my hotel impressed with the way each and every member of our team was able to handle these situations.

As someone who has managed teams of employees before, I couldn’t help but think about how situations like this would affect an employee’s concentration and of course their level of focus at work.  I just hope that if I ever need surgery, that my doctors and nurses are not under the kind of attention distracting stress that I heard this week.