How Jill & Hank work

Client information must be protected properly. Two real risks she named:

• A client had a health condition their partner did not know about — and must never find out. If the system leaks it, that is real harm.
• Other advisers or support staff can currently open a client in the CRM and see private medical details that aren’t theirs to see.

The answer is a proper permission structure — covered in Privacy & permissions below.

• All correspondence by email. Jill works in writing — no phone calls.
• Storing information. The bulk of the role: taking scanned files, notes and fact finds and entering them into the system (today, Pipedrive).
• Insurer correspondence. Anything that comes in from the insurance providers, she passes on to the adviser.
• Annual reviews. She works from bullet points, uses the client’s preferred name, and sends one email to both the adviser and the client.
• Single source of information. If anyone has a question about a client, they ask Jill — she holds it all.

Claims are a big part of the role. Hank fields the call and hands it to Jill; she then follows up.

1. Send the claim documentation from Partners Life. (Partners Life is bringing in a portal so claims can be lodged online.)
2. Fill in the claim number, and tick the consent box on the insurer’s form — “would you like your adviser to know?” — so the adviser is kept in the loop and involved.
3. Complete the form for the client to reduce their friction, save it as a PDF, and scan it in at the back.
4. If there is a surgery or medical event coming up, flag it to the insurer so the claim is prioritised.
5. File every copy against the client record.
6. Keep the claims history. A past claim affects future cover — for example, an existing claim can affect a client’s ability to get income protection later. The record has to remember it.

• Claims done right — correct disclosure, every time.
• Growing the renewal base of the book.
• Ending the double entry of information — his single biggest frustration.

• Handles the claims — and takes the bad news himself. If a client hears pushback straight from Partners Life, they assume the claim won’t pay and get disheartened. Hank fields those calls, relays what is needed to Jill, and protects the relationship.
• Watches the pipeline. He pulls the data from Partners Life to work out what is in the pipeline and what to expect. He looks at pipeline sales, not cashflow forecasts.
• Plans in January. The quiet ~6 weeks from mid-December are hard to close business in, so he uses them to plan. He pulls each adviser’s performance and asks what they want to achieve for the year — adviser-led, no pressure, so he doesn’t force forecasts.
• Keeps costs simple. Very few overheads — mostly fixed percentage payouts. He just makes sure there is enough set aside to cover fixed costs and any clawbacks.
• Works his referral relationships. Accountants and a networking group, nurtured and educated over time. Multiple sources of referrals matter — “gone are the days you open a phone book and call people.”

Phone-first, backed by text, and a little email. Before a meeting he texts the client to say he’s on his way.

Maintenance, not growth — and both Jill and Hank are motivated to centralise onto the new system and leave Pipedrive behind.

Can be templated: the preferred name, the statement of financial position, and the breakdown — most of the document.

Stays with the adviser: the advice itself is personalised — never fully automated.

The car-check stays printed and delivered in person. Hank sees little value in a video or audio version of the plan — being in the room, where you can see if the client is listening and talk with them, is the point.

Where it’s heading: send the application straight from the CRM to each provider using their own systems, so the details already held never have to be re-keyed onto an application form.

The CRM can put each adviser (and support user) on “only assigned data” — they see only the clients assigned to them, and nothing of other advisers’ clients. Jill and Hank sit above that as administrators with full visibility.

The CRM controls access at the record and section level, not field by field. So you cannot, today, hide just the medical field from a person who can otherwise open that client. Field-level permissions are a requested feature but aren’t built.

• Protect sensitive clients at the record level: the record is visible only to the assigned adviser plus Jill and Hank.
• For an especially sensitive case, keep the detail in a restricted note or document rather than an open field everyone on that record can read.
• For Ryan to confirm: whether it’s worth pursuing field-level locks given the platform limit, or whether record-level control is enough from a compliance point of view.

Jill and Hank described how the police keep contemporaneous notes — also called job sheets: a dated, timed record of what happened and what was discussed, that can be relied on later.

The CRM’s conversations tab is exactly that: one chronological, time-stamped history for each client — every call, text, email and note, in order. It is the defensible “what happened, and when” for any client or claim, all in one place.

Hank would like to track sales performance — conversion by adviser, drawn from Partners Life — which he doesn’t track today. It would be an early-warning signal for who’s converting and who isn’t.

Captured here as something to work on later — not part of this first piece of work.