"I would like to move my accounts,” says the voice on the phone. Your stomach drops and you instinctively want to defend yourself and your firm. “Why?” you finally manage to whisper. Through the rest of the conversation, you struggle to understand the communication disconnect—to explain, defend or even try to persuade the client to stay.

I’m fairly sure that this conversation has happened to most advisors over their practice experience. I know it has happened to me.
Sometimes, clients don’t even have the courtesy to speak with you first. You get a notice or a call from a new firm with instructions to transfer the accounts. Those are probably the worst because you know the client does not want to speak with you and you have so much to say.

Let’s take a minute and explore why clients fire their advisors. Spectrem, in its December 2014 report, Advisor Relationships and Changing Advice Requirements, revealed that almost 49% of the respondents in a poll it performed would fire an advisor for not returning a phone call on the same day. Forty percent said they would fire an advisor for slow e-mail responses, and 24% said they would for investment losses over a two-year period. Lack of communication and performance seem like the two big ones to me too, but I think we need to look deeper into the underlying reasons for discontent.

I’ve spent some time thinking about this. It’s a divorce of sorts. Why do people get divorced? Obviously, the relationship is broken and one or both people have decided that it can’t be repaired. Sometimes it happens slowly over a period of time and sometimes suddenly it’s clear, at least to one person, that it is over. “It’s over.” To me, this screams of a lack of trust, as well as unmanaged, unfulfilled and unexpressed expectations, just like what may happen in an advisory relationship.

The blushing bride knows exactly what her marriage will be like; she has been picturing it in her mind and dreaming about it since she was 10. But many clients don’t know what to expect from an advisory relationship. The idea of paying for advice isn’t foreign, but it is unfamiliar.

And since professional relationships are very dependent on personalities, it’s difficult for the parties to separate the advice from the relationship. I had a doctor once who was an extremely good diagnostician but severely lacking in bedside manner. Any condition short of terminal was treated but disregarded. I wouldn’t have wanted to go to dinner with the guy, but I sure would want him in my hospital room if I were seriously ill. So often when we speak of lack of communication, I think we are also speaking of a lack of trust or credibility.

“I think there are several factors that may lead to a client firing his advisor,” says Matt Lynch, president of Strategy & Resources LLC, a consulting firm for financial advisors. “But at the most basic level, I think often it is a function of a failure to clearly communicate the client service offering or value proposition and then align delivery to the service offering.

“I frequently see advisors trying to distance themselves from the ‘outperform the market’ label,” he says, “and yet the only way/time they communicate with clients is through quarterly statements comparing portfolio performance to the benchmarks. This same advisor type tends to operate under the ‘no news is good news’ philosophy—that if they don’t hear from the client, all is good.”

There’s that ugly word, “performance.” Clients expect it, even when you think you have made it clear that you are not attempting to outperform the markets. When I was a kid, whatever our family doctor said was revered. We respected his wisdom and knowledge, and it never occurred to us that he was in any way fallible. Sometimes I think clients naively believe that advisors have these same characteristics, which is why the clients are so disillusioned when markets are volatile and performance expectations are not met, even if we have spent considerable time trying to disabuse them of the notion that we can control markets and therefore performance.

Conversely, some advisors make promises they can’t keep—either about outperforming or being available—and that can erode the client’s trust and the advisors’ credibility.

Patti Houlihan, past chair of the CFP Board and the CEO/president of Houlihan Financial Resource Group, says that a “lack of communication over the long haul is a big failure with many advisors. If you can’t remember the last time you talked to your client, trust me, he will remember the last time he talked to you.” She points out that advisors seldom make changes in their services over time to reflect that they and the client have grown together. She suggests reviewing your different services and fees and adjusting them periodically.

“We don’t have the same level of planning to do when we have worked with our clients over a long period of time,” she says. “It’s important that we make them aware of all the work we really do for them. For example, we often make monitoring and management look so easy, we assume that the clients don’t want to see the ‘sausage being made.’ Truth is, they probably should be more informed about our work behind the scenes. I think they would have a better understanding of our value.”

Fortunately, most of us are not confined to one way of working with our clients. Unbundling our activities and fees may encourage clients who are fee-sensitive to reconsider leaving. But I also truthfully don’t believe that fees are the main reason for discontent.

Just like the end of a marriage, I believe the end of a client-advisor relationship may reflect accumulated years of unfulfilled promises (inconsistent service), a lack of appreciation (when one person takes the relationship for granted), or a failure to acknowledge and discuss any value disconnect (a failure to communicate honestly and openly). It may be that we all need to become more thoughtful and deliberate in accepting and maintaining relationships with our clients. Relationships take work; if we don’t value them, we certainly won’t want to work at them.

However, it may also be that the relationship has run its course. The work has been done and the client may not need what we have to offer any longer. We fire difficult clients; why not graduate the ones who have accomplished what they set out to do? When it’s over, it’s over.

Deena Katz is associate professor in the personal financial planning department at Texas Tech University, a partner in Evensky & Katz in Coral Gables, Fla., and the author of several books on planning and practice management.