Advisor Blindspots - What Your Clients Are NOT Telling You - Financial Advisor Tips

Here’s a question for you. Have you ever been surprised by a client that emails you or calls you letting you know they no longer need your help or they found another advisor? Or do you ever wonder if you’re doing everything you should be doing to really serve these people as their financial advisor? The thought of “am I doing everything that I should” I think a lot.

I want to share a simple action you can take that doesn’t take much time at all. It’s going to allow you to get out in front of that feeling or worry of somebody leaving you. Find out the problem before it actually is a problem. We started doing it last year and we plan to do it once a year going forward because of the results we’ve seen so far.

Learn what your client is thinking by asking simple questions

So when you think about it, your client, if they contact you to leave and go to someone else, it’s not a knee jerk decision or a one-off idea that they had suddenly one day. It’s usually a decision that formulates over a period of months. You might think everything‘s going great, but you just don’t realize that you’ve got a Blindspot. So one way to discover your blindspots is by sending a simple three question anonymous survey once per year or every three months.

We just completed ours and found some helpful findings from our clients. I’ll share with you what those findings are, but first I wanna share the questions that we asked in the survey. it’s really three or four questions.

Net Promoter Score helps track client satisfaction year-over-year

We modeled it after the NPS or the net promoter score. The nice thing about doing this every year is that you can get a score, some number out of 100 every year, and track it to see how you’re doing. It’s really great as you bring on new advisers, if you’re growing, or whatever is happening in your firm to see how things progress.

If you’re thinking about doing this, first make sure you’re involving your compliance team first.

And if you’re currently doing this tell me how long you've been doing it and let me know what your thought process for doing it, how has it gone, or would you recommend it to other advisers? So let me share the questions we asked.

Simple ranking are good, but always ask for more details

The first question is just the true NPS question, which is “on a scale of 1 to 10 how likely are you to recommend a business to a friend or a colleague.” That’s the NPS question and then they have a choice 1 through 10. And then we asked two more questions which really gave us real insight.

Question number two is “why did you choose that number” and then we just left open space to answer. And question number three is “what could we be doing better?” This is where the real insight came from. As we look through the answers to get the third question we saw some suggested improvements that fell into three main categories.

Receive feedback, and then implement it

The first one was accessibility by phone. Currently we have a phone tree for the front desk. We haven't had a real person on phones since 2019. So the survey mentioned that making it easier to contact their advisor would be nice. The second area was related to communication around investments. There was this theme that was making sure clients understood the investment philosophy better.

Tim and I do these monthly videos for clients and this idea of the investment philosophy was so useful. The last video from February we dove a little more into the investment philosophy and why the portfolios are set up the way they are. And we took more time than normal to explain this, based on this feedback. And we actually got feedback right away from people who replied to that email, which is really great.

Now the last one was related to the streamline dashboard, so we use Emoney and if you know any financial planning softwares out there, you know you get the homepage for clients. So we got some feedback on that.

So those were the three questions, and that was the response and the themes that we heard back from people. Now onto the software that we used to make this easy.

Find the survey tool that works for you

There are endless software options out there to choose from for this survey. The software that we use is Typeform. The reason we used it is it’s pretty slick and flows well for the user. If you’ve ever used it or demoed it then you know what I mean. It delivers reports that are easy to read and evaluate the answers from clients.

But really any software can do this. Google forms is a free software that can do a survey. Survey Monkey is another popular one. The reason we didn’t choose that one is because when you enter your email, you get added to a subscription list unless you have the paid version. So just keep those things in mind.

I suggest giving this a shot, after you talk to compliance, and see if there’s a blindspot for your company that is keeping you from serving your clients better this year. Let me know how it goes in the comments below.