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Advisors are great at getting to know their clients – you have to be. Learning the intimate details of a person’s finances means understanding them as a person. But there are some details about your clients that you don’t know – things that don’t naturally come up as part of financial planning – that will improve your relationship with them.
That’s where a client survey provides value.
Client surveys are helpful in the wake of COVID-19, since social distancing has thrown human interactions off kilter. Clients feel disconnected.
Ask clients what they think. They will be more willing to answer questions and share details, since they are facing fewer inquiries in daily life. You will get valuable information about how to keep your clients engaged, regardless of distance.
Just conducting the survey isn’t enough, however. You need to make sure the survey is effective. Here are my tips for creating an impactful client survey:
1. Have a clear goal in mind
What don’t you know about your clients that you wish you did? If you aren’t sure where to start, or you don’t know what you don’t know about clients, communication is a good one. How we prefer to be communicated with changes over time and with trends. (In 2019, how many people do you know who used Zoom? Now, video chat is the norm for many people.) A survey is a great way to find out if clients want to get emails from you and how frequently. Ask what social media platforms they use and where they get information on financial topics (other than you, of course). Knowing that your clients prefer the Wall Street Journal or that they’ve been seeing some great videos on alternative investments on TikTok will tell you a lot in just one question.
2. Know how you’ll use the survey
In addition to a goal, you want to know how you’ll use results. For instance, if you want to gauge client satisfaction and use those results with prospects, phrase the question in a way that will get you the most useful answer.
If your goal is gauging client satisfaction and you want to share those results with prospects, you might ask: “Overall, are you satisfied with the financial advice we provide?” Offer the option to answer “yes” or “no.” This could get you a powerful takeaway for prospects: “92% of clients are satisfied with the financial advice we provide.”
If you want to gauge client satisfaction for internal use, ask clients to rate their satisfaction on a 1-10 scale, and ask more specific questions, like “How satisfied are you with financial planning?” and “How satisfied are you with how we manage your investments?”
3. Structure the survey strategically
Market research firms get better engagement with surveys and questionnaires if you ease respondents into things. Asking clients to fill in the blank or write sentences initially, especially if the question requires thinking, takes them off the survey. It sends a message that the survey will take time and energy, and that can be enough to make clients think, “I’ll do this later when I have more bandwidth,” or even, “This looks like work, I don’t want to fill it out.”
Get around this by starting with simple questions that have yes/no or multiple-choice answers. If you have more complex questions, put them toward the end of the survey. If a client knows they’re almost done, they’re more likely to answer and less likely to quit early. Some survey platforms track progress and estimated time remaining, though to benefit from these trackers you need to ensure your survey is brief.
4. Use software that makes your life easier
There are different tools you can use to build a survey; SurveyMonkey and TypeForm are two firms designed just for surveys. CRMs also give you the option to run a survey; HubSpot and MailChimp both offer this feature, for example.
Fact Finder was designed to help with prospecting, but it can also be adapted and used with existing clients to help you survey them.
Which software you use depends on the first three steps in this article. If you decide you’re using the survey internally and you want to drill down on different segments within your clients, you want to create logic flows, where how you answer a question determines the next question the respondent sees. You’d need to make sure the technology you’re using allows for logic flows.
It’s possible to create a good client survey with whatever technology you have easily available to you; unless you’re planning to send a lot of questionnaires, it isn’t worth searching for (or worse, paying for) a new set of software.
John Mackowiak is the chief business development officer at the portfolio management software company Advyzon. In addition to managing client surveys for Advyzon, he’s helped Advyzon clients design surveys and questionnaires for investors using the Advyzon Fact Finder tool.
Read more articles by John Mackowiak