Practice Made Perfect 7 is the ideal opportunity to spend quality time with the best financial-advisory business consultants in the country. You get tips, tools, and worksheets to ensure that you can manage your practice to become the business success you want it to be. This book will be your new best friend—guaranteed | This page is intentionally blank The Value of Surveys AS advisers strive to build closer relationships with their clients and improve the quality of their services more firms have begun to formalize their approach to gathering feedback from clients. For advisory firms developing and refining their business strategy we ve found client surveys to be invaluable because they help the firms get in tune with their market and with the services the optimal client looks to them to provide. For many years we were skeptical about the value of client surveys because we did not believe that eliciting satisfaction scores from clients would garner anything particularly insightful. it seemed unlikely that clients who disliked an adviser would respond and those that had warm and fuzzy feelings about their advisers would probably sugarcoat their responses. The validity and real value of the client surveys was always suspect to us. Then we found a survey process that not only allowed clients to evaluate their advisers in a meaningful way but also could be used as a tool to allow clients to identify their needs and preferences in adviser- client communication and the planning areas they wish advisers would address with them. Advisers who participated in such surveys were generally surprised by the results because in many cases they thought they had broached these subjects with their clients but the overtures had not always registered. Ross Levin of Accredited investors for example tested a tool developed by Advisor impact of Toronto. Our results were positive and yet some of the specific points were surprising he says. Some clients wanted to meet less 39 40 Practice Made Perfect often than we currently do. Also some clients wanted more general communication. After the survey we worked with our staff to determine optimum meeting schedules. We also now send out a regular e-mail update on our views on the market interest rates and other relevant data. Hear No Evil Despite the potential .
