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| > The Practice > Practice Builder |
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| How to Design a Client Satisfaction Survey |
| by
Helen Modly
| 06-30-05 |
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Conducting a client survey is a popular activity and, if done correctly, can yield valuable insight and information about keeping your clients satisfied. Unfortunately, many advisors burden their clients with pages of redundant questions where the client's only choice is to select an answer from one to 10. I do not like wasting my time on such surveys and neither do you. Why subject a loyal client to such a tedious exercise?
Most firms begin the survey process by borrowing or adapting a survey used by a much larger organization or by writing their own questions. This is a waste of time and energy. Don't do it. Like any other project, an effective survey requires a fair amount of planning before any actual questions are written.
Begin by determining how you are going to conduct your survey. Will it be face to face, by phone, online, or written and mailed to clients? Who will conduct the survey--your staff or an outside vendor? Will the survey be anonymous or will you be able to link responses to specific clients? And the most important question:
- What is it you want to find out?
Identify in writing one or more global research goal or objective for the survey. Some suitable objectives might be:
- I want to know if clients are satisfied with our services, their investment performance, and our overall relationship with them.
- Is there a relationship between one variable and another?
- Are there any perceived differences between one variable and another?
Limit your survey to three to five global objectives or the number of questionnaire questions may fatigue your clients.
When the goals are established, you are ready to write your basic research questions. These are also general in nature and can be either verifiable or non-verifiable. In the statistical sense, something is verifiable if it can be replicated or repeated by another researcher using the same tools. A verifiable question might be, "Is there a relationship between a client's age (or gender, or account size) and their level of satisfaction with our firm? The presence or lack of such a relationship can be verified by creating a basic matrix of the variables you want to consider (age, gender, size of account) and the survey responses on level of satisfaction.
This assumes that you are not doing an anonymous survey that has limited usefulness for a relationship-based firm. If there are issues or problems, we want to know which clients are experiencing them so we can respond effectively.
Research questions can also be non-verifiable, meaning they cannot be easily quantified. These would include questions regarding attitudes, feelings, desires for new products, and services. The responses from open-ended questions or comment boxes can be summarized in descriptive tables. These types of research questions often yield the most useful information regarding your clients' experiences with your firm.
Once your general research questions are identified, you are ready to develop your questionnaire. For verifiable questions, you might use a number scale, an "either/or" response (such as yes/no or true/false) or a multiple choice response. Your questions must capture the information on the variables being examined (age, gender, account size) or you must positively be able to link the responses to individual clients. For non-verifiable research questions, you might use "fill in the blanks," open-ended questions, or comment boxes.
For our firm, we chose to conduct a client survey with the goal of discovering whether or not our clients were satisfied with our services and why. Our research questions are:
- How do our clients feel about our relationship activities: responsiveness, accessibility, our understanding of their situation, our level of proactivity, the quality of our personal interactions?
- How do our clients feel about the services we provide: the accuracy, relevance, and frequency of their reports; ongoing financial consulting; tax-planning?
- How do our clients feel about our portfolio management activities: suitability of portfolio design, the effectiveness or security decisions, portfolio performance vs. their personal investment objectives?
- Are there services we should be offering?
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Helen Modly, CFP, ChFC, is executive vice president and director of investment services for Focus Wealth Management, a fee-only registered investment advisor in Middleburg, Va. Modly has more than 20 years of experience providing wealth-management services. She is a member of NAPFA and FPA. She can be reached at info@focus-wealth.com.
The author is not an employee of Morningstar, Inc. The views expressed in this article are the author's. They do not necessarily reflect the views of Morningstar. |
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