At Issue: Client service, ideally seamless, simply seems less

Your Nov. 17 Monday Morning [“Take no chances with customer service”] is right on the money. As a longtime practitioner in both the insurance and investment world, I am appalled at current levels of customer service. Essentially, the term has become an oxymoron. There’s lots of talk and very little delivery.

It used to be that finding a prospect and selling them was the challenge. That has now become the easier part of the puzzle, and the challenges are submitting the business, tracking it and then ultimately being able to service it – to reassure the client of what they originally purchased. Unfortunately, insurance/investment companies are all too eager to promote new business and provide far too little servicing capabilities.

Our office has two basic mottoes:

* Service is the best marketing tool that we have.

* Answer the client’s questions while they still remember them.

We also have adopted the following credos:

* If you like our service, tell someone.; if you don’t, tell us.

* A customer who complains is really our best friend.

Finally, you mentioned that “a large part of customer service is creating a seamless experience.” My experience – anytime I hear the word “seamless” in connection with a change or transition – is that it does indeed “seem less” than the previous procedure.

Please keep your attention focused on this important, essential component of the financial services business.

THOMAS B. WHEELER CLU, ChFC, REBC

President

Wheeler Associates

Duluth, Minn.

Tax talk

In your Nov. 17 One on One, Pamela F. Olson, assistant Treasury secretary for tax policy, makes a number of important points I’d like to expand upon.

* For employees without employer-sponsored plans, $3,000 per year in an IRA is usually inadequate retirement savings.

I’d go further: On what policy basis can you defend allowing the self-employed to tax-defer $40,000, employees with access to employer-sponsored plans $12,000 and em- ployees without access only $3,000? Shouldn’t every American be able to defer the same amount of compensation? Shouldn’t employer contributions fall under that same limit? Why are we now effectively favoring those who work for more generous employers?

* Less than 50% of the public is covered by an employer-sponsored plan, with those in smaller organizations even less likely to be covered, and work force mobility discourages commitment to such plans (despite their portability).

Plans for smaller organizations generally have intermediary costs that one can avoid when investing individually, yet plan trustees don’t provide better investment menus or services. Why do we even want employers in the middle? Yes, offering a pension plan is a recruiting issue, but are the interests of employers and employees really congruent? We’ve seen a drop in plan participation rates in the bear market even though employees should be more willing to invest at lower prices. Where’s the investment education?

* The complexity of contribution and distribution rules discourages financial institutions and savers.

Why not create retirement savings accounts with a unified contribution limit and decommission the morass of 401(k), 403(b), [individual retirement account, simplified employee pension] and [savings incentive match plan for employees] IRAs? Employers could still offer matching and/or profit-sharing contributions, but they would flow into the employee’s own RSA.

The rest of our tax system suffers from complexity, too. The result is what economists call “dead-weight losses” from the costs of compliance and planning, and what I call life opportunity losses when people are so bewildered that they fail to enhance their financial security.

Robert J. Cohen

Financial Counseling Berkeley, Calif.