PlanMember Financial reviews

We encourage this employee to discuss their “CRM” comments with their manager and propose that this be considered at our bi-weekly Platform Committee Meetings. All ideas for platform improvement are welcome from any company source. We also strongly agree with the commentor that PlanMember is good, we might even say great, at training staff for a career in Financial Services, and in particular, Investments. We provide initial training, support for securities industry licenses and credentials and encourage work on industry committees and associations. We do have a different view on the comments about being “poor” at retention. This remains a competitive industry and the overall skills our employees gain at PlanMember are highly desirable, especially at firms that do not invest the time into training that PlanMember does. With that being said, our Securities Industry Training Program (SIT), which recruits new college graduates into our SIT program has over the past 15 years since inception retained and promoted a huge percentage of SIT entrants. Graduates of the SIT are now Managers and Directors of various Operations department desks, Compliance professionals, and the vast majority of our Sales Support staff. Several of our SIT graduates have gone on to become Independent Investment advisors in our business and our hugely successful, both financially and happiness-wise. While a minority of the SIT candidates have moved on to success with other Financial Services firms, we applaud their success knowing that our training assisted them in the early success of their career. Finally, staffing levels are always in flux in a large service organization, in what is frankly, a smaller sized employment pool of Santa Barbara/Ventura. We acknowledge that the pendulum can swing from full employment periods to other times where recruiting replacement staff is more difficult. The current post-pandemic “reopening” is an example of a tougher environment for employers to attract and hire qualified candidates, although we have invested in more internal and external recruiters to help us get through this challenging environment.

Our Securities Industry Training program (SIT) provides 8 weeks of Industry and Company training to help prepare our employees for their call work. We have two full-time trainers and four call center managers to assist, support and teach the phone service representatives daily. We certainly acknowledge the challenges of customer service phone center work; it can be exhausting, especially calls with dissatisfied and/or obstinate callers. However, business learning is accelerated by learning to be proficient with these client calls and is essential in providing the skills and credentials for these employee’s future advancement within PlanMember, or elsewhere in the industry.