Maintaining your business through a crisis

By - Kane
08.04.21 01:46 PM

As we settle into the new norm of working from home full time, this signifies a rather different way for many of us to do business without any face-to-face communication or office interaction.


In light of this, Ben Wright, Tenet's Business Development Director summarises some key areas to consider, in order that you can continue to operate in the best way possible in the current climate.


Business support

There are plenty of tools available to remotely interact with clients. For instance, both Zoom and Microsoft Teams can help you stay in touch, share files and screens with colleagues and clients. What’s more, if you’re a Tenet network member, you can access Intelligent Office's Personal Finance Portal (PFP) which offers the ability for secure messaging and document sharing with clients, as well as 24/7 access to client's own financial information.


Maintaining client updates at this time is still important, so we have shared a client communications guide, covering a wide range of topics, including video conferencing, and have provided compliance approved client facing bulletins for both the investment and mortgage space, to help our members keep their clients informed.


Now could also represent a good time to consider diversifying your business and expand your product/service range for clients. For instance, ensuring your clients have adequate protection in place now more than ever is particularly important. Why not revisit your existing mortgage clients for example, who were not in a position, for whatever reason, to take the protection policies they needed when the mortgage completed and open a protection conversation?


At Tenet, we are running remote training courses so should members wish to brush up on their knowledge in a certain area, our training team are here to help. We are also offering our members the opportunity to refer protection leads to our financial advice arm, Aspire Financial Management, should they not be able to service these clients themselves.


Technical support

There is plenty of information available in regard to the impact of Coronavirus on numerous aspects of business, but making sense of it all can be challenging. For instance providers and lenders are issuing new updates frequently. To help manage this new information, third party sites such as Protection Guru and the Mortgage Solutions email newsletter are both really useful ways to keeping up to date.


Given the current pace of change we are providing our members with a daily round up of all mortgage, protection, investment and pension news from our Technical Services and Research department, as well as a mortgage criteria spreadsheet where members can find live updates on mortgage valuations, payment holidays, applications and more. The team are also supporting members to navigate the Government funding package and giving guidance on furloughing staff.


Data protection and cyber security

Data protection continues to be important, particularly more so with fraudsters looking to capitalise on the Coronvirus outbreak. To keep you up to speed with navigating data protection during this period, the ICO have created a new data protection and coronavirus information hub to access. Plus, you can also sign up to alerts from Action Fraud, who are a collaboration between police forces and the UK's national reporting centre for fraud and cyber-crime. This will provide you with direct, verified, accurate information about scams and fraud in your area by email, recorded voice and text message.


On top of this, our Risk team have been helping members by providing recent data protection/fraud examples featured in the press, and helpful information on what advisers should be looking out for to avoid making any costly mistakes.


Wellbeing

Despite not having any physical interaction with colleagues or clients, it’s important to remember you aren’t alone and that support is available for both individuals and businesses. As a network, we are communicating with our members daily, and providing more interactive channels such as video conferences with our CEO and leadership team. But as well as this, we want to ensure our members maintain a positive well-being and are offering tips to help them adjust to working from home and managing childcare whilst working for instance.


Whilst no one knows when this period of uncertainty will end, it makes sense to make the most of the situation and utilise the support that’s available to you and to help you try and carry on as best as possible during this challenging time.

By Ben Wright

Ben Wright is Tenet's Business Development Director.

Email: ben.wright@tenetgroup.co.uk

Kane