Service issues take away a lot of an IFA’s productive time, but they must anyway be dealt with. This is where IFAs look towards fund houses for quick support and fast turnaround of their service queries. For an IFA, the most easily accessible is the fund house RM – but that means the RM in turn spends a lot of his sales time in handling service queries. The tried and tested solution is to encourage IFAs to direct their service queries to the fund house’s call centre, and most fund large houses have dedicated central call centres to address distributor queries.

What Aditya Birla Sun Life AMC found was that this solution of a central call centre remained a solution only on paper. Most IFAs don’t like the idea of patiently wading through the IVR options of the call centre until you finally get through to a call centre rep, then explain the problem to somebody sitting thousands of miles away and then when you call back for a status update, you speak to a completely different person. Trying to get in touch with your RM seems a far better option, even if you know that your service query will naturally be a lower priority for a sales RM.

ABSL AMC came up with a localised, IFA friendly solution that values everyone’s time – the IFAs, the sales RM’s and the investor’s. It set up its first Partner Priority Desk in Mumbai for distributors in and around Mumbai, manned by trained specialists, dedicated only for distributors. IFAs get an actual telephone number – not a 1-800 call centre number, and a specialist answers the phone, not an IVR. Queries are handled quickly and efficiently, all queries logged into a dedicated system to enable tracking until satisfactory closure. IFAs have the comfort of speaking to somebody locally, who will take responsibility for the query and see it through to resolution. Feedback from distributors has been very encouraging and ABSL AMC is now planning a national roll out in phases in the coming months.

Most large banks have implemented a concept of a service RM who supports clients on service requests, thus allowing the sales oriented RM to maximise his efficiency, while at the same time ensuring that clients get served efficiently and promptly. It is heartening to see this concept being implemented within the fund industry – a good example of a win-win for everyone.

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