Each year VouchedFor publishes their guide to financial advisers who have qualified as Top Rated on its platform.
In 2021 the guide will be distributed during April in the printed edition of The Times and digitally via some of VouchedFor’s media partners.
What are the benefits of qualifying?
Qualification is open to both individual advisers and firms.
For advisers who qualify, VouchedFor will highlight on their adviser’s profile that they are Top Rated. Firms who qualify will also receive a powerful firm profile highlighting their Top Rated firm status.
Both advisers and firms will also receive several other tools including:
- Reports
- Certificates
- A Top Rated badge.
There are many ways these tools can be used to promote inclusion, including:
- Adding the Top Rated badge prominently to your website
- Emailing clients and prospects to inform them of your inclusion
- Writing a blog or recording a video to promote your inclusion
- Using them in your office to impress clients and prospects when face-to-face meetings return.
Closer to the time we’ll publish a checklist of all the ways you can use the tools.
Finally, both firm and individual profiles rank highly on Google and make it easy for prospects and clients to see that you deliver consistently outstanding client service.
What are the qualification criteria?
You can qualify:
- As an individual financial adviser, mortgage adviser or (for the first time) protection adviser
- As a Top Rated firm
- Both
To qualify as an individual adviser, you need:
- A minimum of ten reviews between 1st January 2020 and 31st January 2021 with an average rating of 4.5/5
- An all-time rating of 4.5/5
- To be a verified member of VouchedFor, which means you’ve passed their checks.
To qualify as a firm, you need:
- To invite 100% of your firm’s clients to review you on VouchedFor (there are some sensible exemptions to this rule, including clients who don’t have an email address, which can be found in the first of the FAQs on this page)
- To pledge to invite all future clients to leave a review
- To show your clients are engaged by ensuring at least 20% of your clients respond to your review request
- To achieve an all-time rating for your firm of 4.5/5 or higher
- Either a minimum of 100 reviews as a firm or a minimum of 25 reviews per adviser.
There’s an important caveat to make about firms being included in the guide itself.
As VouchedFor states: “Space is finite so if more firms qualify than we have space for, we will feature the best large, medium, and small firms based on their rating. All Top Rated Firms will be highlighted within the listings of any of their individual advisers who qualify as Top Rated Advisers in the Guide. All Top Rated Firms will be featured in the digital guide and will have access to the Promotional Assets.”
That means only the best firms will receive the maximum benefit of being ‘Top Rated’ making it more important than ever to deliver truly excellent service.
How do you qualify?
To qualify as an individual adviser all you need to do is gather the required number of reviews and meet the minimum rating by 31st January 2021.
Firms who wish to enter need to notify VouchedFor of their interest by clicking here and completing a short form. Then, follow the instructions VouchedFor will send. The deadline for requesting reviews and meeting the other criteria is also 31st January 2021.
How can The Yardstick Agency help?
We believe that being included in VouchedFor’s Top Rated guide provides valuable social proof to help you build your business.
You can request the reviews from your clients yourself, or you can ask us to do it for you by buying our ‘VouchedFor review request package’.
The package includes:
- Agreeing on the wording of the review request email with you
- Bespoke email messages for multi-adviser firms
- Sending an initial request to your clients
- Sending a reminder request
- Reporting back on the number of reviews received.
The cost of that service is:
| Yardstick Members (firms who take our blog and newsletter package) | Non-Yardstick Members | |
| Sole adviser firms | £168 | £368 |
| Multi adviser firms | £168 plus £56 per additional adviser | £368 plus £56 per additional adviser |
*All prices exclude VAT
If you would like to buy the ‘VouchedFor review request package’ please click here to complete our online form.
As always, we hope this article has been useful. If you have any questions or queries, please email hi@theyardstickagency.co.uk or call 0115 8965 300.
