Client Experience Surveys for Financial Advisors: Unlocking Valuable Insights

In the competitive landscape of financial advisory services, understanding and meeting clients’ needs is paramount to success. Yet, it can be challenging to monitor client sentiment, especially as you grow your firm. Many clients do not voice their advisors’ opinions and prefer to simply fire their advisors. 

One study found that for every client who complains, 26 clients don’t voice their opinions. At the same time, 95% of clients share their bad experiences with others. 

Proactively gathering client feedback can combat this. 

A client experience survey is a powerful tool for gauging client satisfaction levels and identifying areas where advisors can enhance their service delivery. By collecting feedback from clients, financial advisors can gain valuable insights into the overall experience clients have throughout their interactions, including onboarding, communication, product offerings, and problem resolution. 

Furthermore, by seeking input from their clients, advisors demonstrate their commitment to their client base and support client retention strategies. This proactive approach strengthens the advisor-client relationship and enhances trust and loyalty, positioning advisors as reliable partners in their clients’ financial journeys. 

How a client experience survey differs from other sources of client feedback

There are a few different ways to monitor the client journey from their perspective outside of a satisfaction survey. Clients may write testimonials, make referrals, or ask questions during meetings. However, most of these references aren’t always easy to track. 

Client experience surveys offer a proactive approach to gathering feedback. Instead of waiting for clients to initiate contact or share their opinions spontaneously, surveys allow advisors to actively address any issues in a timely manner and improve client loyalty. 

Unlike other sources of client feedback, surveys allow for a more structured and standardized approach to collecting client sentiment. They typically involve well-defined questions to gather specific information about a client’s expectations, concerns, and satisfaction.

These experience surveys also provide a systematic and scalable method of data collection. By reaching out to a larger number of clients and consistently collecting data, advisory firms can analyze and compare feedback across different segments of their client base. Often, this is done using survey software or another digital tool. 

With some survey questions, clients can express their opinions, emotions, and experiences in their own words. This qualitative feedback provides valuable context and can uncover underlying issues or opportunities for improvement that may not be apparent from quantitative data alone. 

Lastly, client experience surveys enable benchmarking and trend analysis. By conducting surveys at regular intervals, advisory firms can track changes in client satisfaction over time and identify areas that require attention or improvement. Comparing results across different survey periods or against industry benchmarks provides valuable insights into the effectiveness of client experience strategies and initiatives.

Designing a solid satisfaction survey

While a client feedback survey can seem like a simple list of questions, there are best practices to increase survey responses and ensure you get the right data. Below are 12 steps to creating an effective client survey: 

1. Define your objectives: Determine the specific goals of your survey. Are you looking to assess overall client satisfaction, identify areas for improvement, or gather feedback on specific services or products? Your aim will determine what questions make the most sense. 
2. Craft clear and concise questions: Use straightforward language and avoid jargon to ensure that clients can easily understand. Make the survey questions specific and relevant. Ideally, you’ll want questions with set responses, such as multiple-choice questions or a satisfaction scale.
3. Begin with demographic questions: Depending on your survey software, you may need to collect basic demographic information, such as age, income bracket, and occupation. However, surveys linked to your client list may already link this information to survey responses. 
4. Measure overall satisfaction: Include a question that asks clients to rate their overall satisfaction with their portfolio or the market. This will give you insight into client sentiment without directly asking about your services. 
5. Assess specific service areas: Ask about specific aspects of your services, such as portfolio management, investment recommendations, retirement planning, or communication. This will enable you to pinpoint areas of strength or improvement.
6. Include open-ended questions: Incorporate open-ended questions to allow clients to express their thoughts and provide valuable feedback. This can help uncover specific issues or suggestions that closed-ended questions may not capture. However, since these qualitative survey questions require more work for the clients, they are sometimes better used when following up with negative responses. 
7. Implement rating scales: Utilize rating scales, such as a 1-5 scale, to measure client sentiment. This allows for quantifiable data, making analysis and comparisons easier.
8. Consider incorporating Net Promoter Score (NPS): NPS is a widely used metric to assess client loyalty. Ask clients how likely they would recommend your services to others. This provides insights into client loyalty.
9. Optimize survey length: Keep the survey concise and focused. Lengthy surveys can lead to survey fatigue and decreased survey response rates. Prioritize questions that deliver the most valuable insights on client needs.
10. Test and refine: Before deploying the survey to your entire client base, run a pilot test with a small group of clients to ensure the survey is clear, comprehensive, and error-free. Analyze the results and make any necessary refinements.
11. Encourage participation: Promote the survey through various channels, such as email, newsletters, or social media. Email surveys are the most common when using survey software, but they can also be shared on private social media channels or applications. 
12. Analyze and act on the results: Once you have collected a sufficient number of responses, analyze the data to identify trends, common themes, and areas for improvement. Use the insights gained to make actionable changes to enhance the client experience and boost retention.

12 common client survey questions for advisory firms

Asking the right questions is key to effective client satisfaction surveys. Each can provide valuable insight into the client journey and identify potential client friction points. 

1. How satisfied are you with our advisory firm’s overall service and guidance?
2. Did our advisors demonstrate a good understanding of your financial goals and objectives?
3. How would you rate the responsiveness and timeliness of our communication with you?
4. Have our advisors been able to address your questions and concerns effectively?
5. How satisfied are you with transparency and clarity in our fee structure and billing practices?
6. To what extent do you feel our advisors have helped you navigate financial challenges or market uncertainties?
7. How likely are you to recommend our advisory firm to a friend or colleague?
8. Did our advisors proactively communicate any changes or updates relevant to your investment portfolio or financial strategy?
9. Do you feel that we have provided you with a comprehensive and tailored financial plan to meet your specific needs?
10. How well do our advisors understand your risk tolerance and investment preferences?  

For many firms, regularly sending out several questions, especially open-ended questions, can decrease the response rate over time. Furthermore, firms will want surveys to tap into short-term client sentiment. Advisers can leverage a short survey to collect responses quickly.

Optimize outreach: The short survey

Advisory firms using Nitrogen Wealth have found success with a fast, two-question email check-in survey. This survey tool asks clients to consider whether they feel good or bad about the market and their portfolio.

This enables advisors to both generally track client sentiment and prioritize which clients need an immediate follow-up. As a result, fiduciaries can spend more time with clients and address their concerns early, thus building client loyalty and trust. 

Start tracking client sentiment

Monitoring client sentiment and satisfaction with a simple survey or questionnaire offers advisory firms many benefits. Improved client retention, rapidly addressed problem areas, and increased communication efficiency all support advisors as they grow their client base. 

And for many, it’s easier to start than you may think. There are several survey tool options available today, but you can also use Nitrogen Wealth’s check-in feature to rapidly get a pulse on client sentiment as a part of your engagement strategy.