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22nd May, 2024 - Webinar replay

Everything you need to know about client surveys in 2024 with John Netting

Phil Bray 

Good morning, everybody. Welcome to a very rainy Nottingham for today’s webinar: Everything you need to know about client surveys in 2024 with our very special guest, John Netting from Barrack. We’ll introduce John more formally in a minute, but as I say, welcome to the webinar today, after last month’s roller coaster ride with Rory Sutherland. Something a little more prosaic today, but nevertheless, really quite important. In time-honoured tradition, we will make a start with Dan doing a bit of housekeeping, so over to you.

Dan Campbell 

Thanks. I’m glad to know it’s not just my neck of the woods, that it’s raining Phil, It’s utterly miserable here so we’re going to have to provide our own sunshine today. Right. So what do we need to know? So I’m Dan, Head of Branding and Design here at The Yardstick Agency. First things first, we are going to be recording the webinar today so don’t worry too much about making notes, focus instead on getting stuck in. By that, we mean it’s a nice safe space we have here. We’ve built that safe space over many years at Yardstick, and we encourage plenty of questions and comments. Agree with us, disagree with us, tell us we’re talking nonsense, or tell us we’re speaking complete sense and you’ve learned a lot; I think I’d prefer that one I’m sure John and Phil would too. And you can do that by using the Q&A box or the chat function. I’m going to be monitoring both today and will read them out at regular intervals. Now, time-depending and I suppose depending on where we end up in 60 minutes time, we’ll sweep up as many as we can before we have to all wave goodbye. So, I mentioned earlier that we’re recording the webinar, which means you’re going to receive a neatly packaged follow-up email with the video link and all the important notes and resources we mention today. We’ve got our Client Engagement Manager Abi to thank for that who, as ever, will be working furiously behind the scenes to make all that happen. So let me pass things over to Phil and John to kick this webinar off.

Phil Bray 

Thanks Dan. We did put a poll up for you to vote in on the way in to the webinar. So if you’ve not voted on that poll yet, please do go and cast your vote and we will reveal the results in a bit. So welcome, John. John has been a constant in my life for many years.

John Netting 

Joined at your side I think.

Phil Bray 

Ha Ha. I used to work with John at Sense network. John even came to my wedding. And since you left Sense Network a few years ago, you have founded BareRock where you are the COO. So, just give us a couple of minutes to talk about your background, John, and who you are. Preferably not talking about beehives as Rory did on the last webinar.

John Netting 

I’ve got a limited knowledge of beehives you’ll be relieved to know. So, I’m from a regulatory and compliance background, primarily. I was a financial adviser, back in the dark ages, almost pre-regulation, if I’m honest. As such, most of my knowledge and experience is of the regulatory environment. What I’ve done recently is moved into the insurance world, and so that we can utilise the regulatory knowledge that I’ve got in how we undertake PI insurance. So, BareRock is very much intended to be a very different style of PI. We’ll touch on that later. But, yeah, my background sort of crosses over a couple of different remits on this call. So I can look not only at the regulatory side of things, but also the PI background.

Phil Bray 

As one of the issues, one of the barriers to running client surveys can often be PI insurers and compliance networks, that’s why I invited John onto this call today. So, what are we going to talk about? We’re going to start by diving into the reasons why you should be running client surveys in your business. We’re then going to talk about when you should run them. We’re going to talk about some of the barriers and that’s when we’re going to throw it open because I do want to hear from everybody on this call what you feel the barriers are when it comes to running client surveys. We are going to talk about six steps to running successful client surveys and then 10 things you should do afterwards, because all too often firms run the client survey, and then kind of look around and think “What do we do next?” So we’re going to talk about 10 things you should do after the client survey. Halfway through, I’m going to get John to talk a little bit for a couple of minutes about BareRock and what they do, because they’ve launched a product recently. But let’s dive straight in. What are the reasons you should be running client surveys? For me, there are four key reasons and the first is that running client surveys and asking your clients for their opinion, on the service you provide, and let’s face it, most of them are not paying an inconsequential amount of money for your services, albeit you deliver huge value, running them shows you care and shows you’re interested in their opinion. That’s the first reason. The second reason it helps improve your business. If you ask the right questions, you will understand what clients like that you’re doing now, that’s useful, but not necessarily going changing, it helps you understand what they dislike that you are doing right now, that starts to get into the realms of being able to help you improve your business, as does the third thing under the improving your business heading, which is when they tell you what they’d like you to do that you don’t do already. So client surveys help improve your business. They also give us social proof that we can use in marketing. We often at Yardstick talk about three boxes we want firms to tick when it comes to social proof, online ratings and reviews, client videos, and client surveys. So, let’s say you ask your clients, would you recommend us to other people? And 98.75% of people said “Yes, we would recommend you to other people.” That’s a stamp that should go in your marketing. It has the benefit of not being 100%, because 100% can look inauthentic, but you can get some fantastic stats from your client survey that you can use in your marketing. Lastly, for me anyway, your client survey underpins your referral and recommendation strategy. There are three questions that we always recommend advisers and planners to put in their client survey to focus on recommendations. I’m not a fan of net promoter score. In the b2c space, I really dislike net promoter score, and that’s largely because you’ve got to explain it. If I say to somebody Yardstick has a net promoter score of 85, it doesn’t mean anything to anybody. If I say 98.75% of Yardstick’s clients would recommend us to other people, it starts to be a little bit easier to understand. In terms of a referral and recommendation strategy, the three questions we recommend asking are: would you recommend us to other people? Have you in the last 12 months? And, what might stop you, what might prevent you from recommending us? Those questions help us to understand what proportion of your clients are advocates, and their names, what proportion of your clients are active advocates actually recommending you, and their names, and lastly, what the barriers might be what might prevent somebody recommending them. And when you’ve got their names, that’s where you start with your referral conversations. When you’ve got the barriers, that’s where you start with conversations as well. So for me, there are four reasons for running client surveys but when John and I were putting this together, John also came up with a couple of other reasons why we should be running client surveys. So John, do you want to take these two?

John Netting 

Absolutely. I think it’s very easy and obviously important that we do surveys for all the positive reasons you referred to before, but they do have some add on benefits that I think are worth not losing sight of. Firstly, the ability to defend future complaints. If you have a very solid response to a customer satisfaction survey that says they received their information, they understood it, they understood why you gave them the advice and that they were happy, it does two things. Firstly, it gives you a very solid thing to point back to if they have selected memory and complain in the future. But also, the client will remember that they gave that survey and then they gave that response and there’s a psychological principle called consistency, where clients don’t like giving different answers than they have done before. It’s not just clients, it’s anybody. You become anchored to your previous response. So the fact that they’ve said they were happy before means they’re less likely to come up with a vexatious or spurious complaint in the future. And if I had a pound for every single time I heard an adviser say “This client was really happy. He totally understood everything and what he’s now saying on the complaint doesn’t bear any resemblance to what actually happened.” That is especially pertinent with claims companies. We’ve probably all heard horror stories of claims companies who just come out with all of a standard list of reasons that they want to try and complain on knowing that it’s a scattergun approach and they hope that they’re going to be able to pick up some reason that’s missing or some shortcoming on the file through that route. Again, having a client survey I have personally as a compliance director had many instances where I’ve had a claims company respond, and I’ve sent that client satisfaction survey where the client has, in their own words, that they were happy and disproved an awful lot of the points on the complaint. I think that strength just to remove those vexatious issues shouldn’t be ignored. I think the second one, though, is probably more pertinent in a lot of ways. Because if you get a complaint through a client satisfaction survey, it gives you the opportunity to fix it quickly. There are some significant benefits to that. Obviously, early detection is important, because if it grows in a client’s mind, grows arms and legs as I refer to it, over time, the complaint later may be more angry as they may get more upset over time. If they’ve got an opportunity to raise something, they weren’t quite happy with an earlier point, it tends to be something you can react to and deal with and that helps strengthen the client relationship, you’d probably retain a client by dealing with something very early and picking up on it through the client satisfaction survey. There’s also the financial impact point of view that clients if they don’t complain early on, they may actually have lost more money one or two years down the line because of market fluctuations. So again, picking up on something early in the process, probably minimises potential redress, and that can only be a positive.

Phil Bray 

Thank you, John. So, if we accept the reasons for running client surveys, the next question is when should we run them? Now, my view of this is that we should run client surveys at fixed points in time and there’s reasons for this. I would space out those fixed points, every one or two years apart, whether it’s one or two years is dictated by the pace of change in the business. The more you are changing in the business, introducing a client portal, new team members, new advisers, new investment propositions, new platforms, that sort of stuff, the more frequently you should run client surveys. If it’s more steady as you go, you might think of elongating that timeframe a little bit. But the three reasons to send client surveys at fixed points in time are, first, I think you get higher completion rates. In my experience, when surveys are sent after a new piece of business is done or after an annual review completion rates fall. We do tend to get higher completion rates – Dan, on that point, I think we’ve got a question about completion rates.

Dan Campbell 

Yeah, we certainly have. So Keith asks, “What response rate should we expect and hope for?”

Phil Bray 

Hiya Keith, I hope you’re well. So, I think this depends on the type of business that you are. So if you are a business with one or two advisers and a relatively small number of clients, I would be hoping for a completion rate of 40 to 50% and we’ll talk about some of the ways you can try and maximise completion rates in a bit. If you are a larger business with multiple advisers, we tend to see completion rates fall a bit, to about a third, but you actually get more responses, because there are more clients to ask, so your dataset is larger. But that’s what I’d say there Keith. And there are things you can do, that we’ll talk about in a bit to increase the completion rate. So, fixed points in time, three reasons for doing it, the first one being higher completion rate. The second, it’s easier to understand trends because you can compare the results at one fixed point in time to another fixed point in time, which makes it easier to compare trends and to see change. So I can think of examples where we’ve run client surveys for firms, and we’ll talk in a bit about how we can help you do that, but we’ve seen firms where they maybe didn’t score so well on response rates from their team, response rates from their advisers, how quickly they got back to their clients. They did something about it, did a survey a year or two later, and they have increased massively. So you could see cause and effect, what they were like in survey one, what they changed, and what they were like in survey two. The third reason for running surveys at fixed point in time is it opens up the opportunity for you to be requesting Google and VouchedFor reviews (which are the two platforms, you should be using to collect reviews) after you’ve done an onboarding meeting with a client, or you’ve done an annual review meeting with a client. Whereas if you send them the survey and a review request, or a review request in a survey, it just doesn’t work, it’s too complicated and things don’t get done. So our view is surveys should be run at fixed points in time, every one or two years for those three reasons. So, we’ve talked about why you should do it, we’ve talked about when you should do it, I want to talk about some of the barriers, some of the concerns about running client surveys. So Dan, this feels like a good moment to get the poll results. Whilst Dan is reading the poll results out, could everyone just put in the chat some of your concerns? What has you anxious/worried/nervous about running client surveys? What are the barriers? Because I want to spend a bit of time trying to break these down. So Dan, let’s start with a poll and everybody put some stuff in the chat, and then we’ll talk about some barriers.

Dan Campbell 

Perfect. Well, due to rounding, the results add up to over 100%, which is brilliant, because I like it when people give more than 100%. So, well done, everybody! We’ve got 40% of people who have never ran a client survey, then we’ve got 40% of people that have run a survey within the last 12 months, 4% Within the last 12 to 24 months, and then 17% over 24 months ago.

Phil Bray 

Sorry, what was the percentage in the last year?

Dan Campbell 

Within the last year is 40%. Then 4% one year to two years. 17% over two years. and 40%? never.

Phil Bray 

That’s interesting. So the balance is kind of split, isn’t it? The majority of people have either never done it, or done it within the last 12 months. And then Dan what have we got on barriers for running client surveys?

Dan Campbell 

Okay, so we’ve got a couple coming in now. So Stephen says, “A barrier is holding up a mirror to the business.” That’s quite a common one. Mark says “Having time afterwards to properly understand the results, and then more importantly, act on them.” Emma says “Advisers not liking potentially not being perfect and not having a top score” that’s quite an understandable barrier. Karen says, oh, that’s a question. We’ll come back to that later. Mike says “They don’t have any concerns, as they’re in contact with all of their clients via a monthly newsletter, which has excellent opening rates.” So that’s quite an interesting avoidance of a barrier by using something else. Clive says, “Knowing how to structure the survey, and then of course, what to actually ask in the first place.” And then Leanne says “Their compliance team have always been hesitant.” And then lastly, Jonathan mentioned, “They’ve got no concerns, because all their feedback, they say is good feedback.”

Phil Bray 

Cool. Leanne, it might be interesting to understand a little bit more about your compliance concerns here because I suspect John might be able to deal with that. And in fact, we’ll probably deal with on this slide. So when we talk to firms about client surveys, and we talk to a lot of firms about a lot of surveys, we get a variety of different barriers. So one of them is “Now isn’t the right time.” There’s always a reason to put it off, for example “We’ve just introduced a new service proposition, let’s survey clients after we’ve rolled it out.” “Investment markets are poor right now. Let’s wait till markets bounce.” “Our support team has been going through a lot of change.” And it’s natural why that would be a reason to not do it, but I don’t think there’s any perfect time. And if you’re looking for a perfect time to run a survey, it kind of defeats the object of doing it. It’s a little bit like firms who suggest, and we gently talk them out of it, cherry picking which clients to ask to complete the survey. I think you should be asking everybody for the reasons we’ve spoken about before. So I would try and avoid that “now isn’t the right time” Our advisers won’t like it, that’s an interesting one. John, you’ve dealt with a lot of multi-adviser firms. What would you say to that point about advisers not liking it? You are on mute John.

John Netting 

The world was happier because I was on mute, my apologies. Yes, it’s an inherent fear for advisers, it’s not uncommon. But what I found is that actually, once they start seeing the feedback come in, it’s actually a bit of a revelation for them, they find it both really useful, and actually a positive reinforcement, that they’re doing a good job. In my experience, feedback is largely very favourable and I think if you get feedback, saying, “I loved all of this, but this could have been a little bit better” and you can act on it, and improve on it, it’s actually something that advisers find quite cathartic once they do it. But it’s a normal barrier before they do it and it’s something that I think, is worth overcoming and getting through that barrier. I would say we had thousands of survey responses back in my previous life and the truth is, it was very rarely negative. The vast majority of feedback reveals that clients are largely very happy. So again, one thing that I would always say to advisers is, and I know it’s a negative way of framing the survey but remember that it gives you a really strong defence and a barrier against a future complaint. It’s a very strong safety net so don’t be scared of it, look at the positives that come out of it.

Phil Bray 

Yeah, it reminds me of a Steven Bartlett, quote, the Dragon’s Den chap. What does he say? “Failure is feedback, feedback is knowledge, and knowledge is power.” I quite like that. The point about encouraging complaints as well, John, so this leads to something else on the slide. So we have had professional indemnity insurers, you’re the only professional indemnity insurer on this call so you’re representing that community, we’ve had professional indemnity insurers say, or advice firms say that they can’t do it because it encourages complaints. How should firms who hit that barrier respond to it? Apart from changing professional indemnity insurer of course.

John Netting 

Which is something that I would love to say. Clearly, we are very pro, we see the benefit of it and going to my aforementioned reasons, there are other benefits from a PII point of view. The ability to have certainty on unknown risks is minimised through having survey responses. But I do understand the inherent fear from compliance and PII insurance on occasion about surveys and about whether it will invite a claim. It might, there is a risk, there is always a possibility, you might get a complaint. I would say, one of two things is more likely the outcome. Firstly, that complaint is something that we would get at some point anyway, all you’re doing is bringing forward that complaint, which again, as I mentioned before, having early line of sight of a complaint means you can react to it quickly and potentially even unwind the issue and correct a mistake. So early awareness is always positive. But I think that without having that empirical understanding of the likely ratio of response to complaint, I can understand why there is that inherent fear. I have the benefit, as I said before, of having done thousands and thousands of client surveys in my previous life, and only seeing a handful of matters that actually became a complaint. The reality is that they will be incredibly few and far between and therefore, the benefit outweighs that risk of the occasional complaint. The other thing to think about is making sure that your survey is clear and is asking the right questions. I do have some sympathy with some insurers, for example, where they don’t like sliding scales. So you know, “Were you happy with the service? 1 – 10” If somebody puts a four is that an expression of dissatisfaction? Is that a complaint? I think having a carefully constructed survey that doesn’t have that ambiguity will also help you get it approved by your insurer. So spend a bit of time on construction of the survey as well and just think about whether there are accidental pitfalls in it.

Phil Bray 

Thanks, John. That’s one of the reasons when we’re doing client surveys on behalf of firms, we don’t use sliding scales. Because they’re completely subjective. One person’s four is another person’s six, one person’s eight is another person’s seven, it’s just so subjective. That’s why we don’t use them. So John, it sounds like the answer to this is getting involved in a constructive dialogue with your PI insurer or your network, explaining the benefits of doing this, trying to be a bit rational about it, and try and take them on a journey with you.

John Netting 

Yeah. Or move PI insurer.

Phil Bray 

There is that and we’ll come on to that. Dan, are there any other objections, difficulties and barriers that people have talked about in the chat whilst John and I have been speaking?

Dan Campbell 

For the most part, everybody is saying the same thing. But it’s nice to see a few people in the chat don’t have any barriers or hesitations, a lot of people are seeing that the fact that you may get a complaint is a very small possibility and the pros vastly outweigh that.

Phil Bray 

Thanks. Just finishing off on teams, because I’m aware, we’ve got some firms here, who’ve got multi-advisers in their teams attending this webinar. For me, it’s about taking the advisers on a bit of a journey. Often those in the business with responsibility for marketing, or responsibility for the client surveys are a little bit out in front of the rest of the business in their thinking and their thought process when it comes to client surveys. So sometimes advisers have got a little bit of catching up to do and they’re a little nervous about surveys being run. So, it’s about a constructive dialogue explaining the reasons why, those six reasons why we’ve spoken about before. By all means, draw on Yardstick’s experience, and John’s experience of the fact that the world doesn’t come to an end when you run a client survey, the sky doesn’t fall in, good things happen. Then if you haven’t got them, play the consumer duty card. We’re 28 minutes into this and it’s the first time I think we’ve mentioned consumer duty. So do try and get over the barriers, because the benefits of running a client survey to you, your business, your team, are massive. So we’ve talked about PI insurance, and some of you on the call might be wondering who John is, and who BareRock is. So I thought, John, if you could spend just a couple of minutes explaining about BareRock. And then we’re going to go back into client surveys, and some of the nitty gritty about how you run this. I can see some questions that have come in about which questions to ask. So we’ll explain how you run it, and what you should do afterwards. So John, we’re going to go all Chris Whitty now and you tell me when you want me to move on the slides.

John Netting 

This could be fun. I don’t think I’ve ever had you drive my slides before, this is a slightly nervous moment in my life, I have to be honest. Now. Yeah, thank you for that. We are new to the market, We’ve jumped ahead quite quickly there, Can we go back? Thank you. BareRock is a new PI service and we utilise an existing broker business called IFAPROSURE who some of you may know. Jonathan Newell, myself, and a third director called James Adley have formed the basis of this business. We’ve been working on it for a number of years, and it’s taken years because we literally wanted to redesign it from the ground up. And so when we say “PI reimagined” it is literally a process that we’ve looked at every single element, every step of the process, every document every single process flow, and looked at where we can make improvements. The whole point, if you just do a quick click, we should get a partial build on this slide. Oh, we don’t, never mind. The whole basis and the underlying premise of this logic is to look at building a different way of underwriting and dealing with PII for IFAs. The legacy market and quite understandably, because of how they operate and the limitations on what they do., fundamentally, the influence on the rating and on the premium for firms is largely based on the market risk. That’s the biggest influencer, looking at what’s happening in the market. So when something goes wrong in the market, PI insurance reacts to the overall risk, rather than looking at well, there is that issue, but does it apply to this individual firm at a granule level. That’s because the data and the information that’s retained is very difficult. So if you just click. What we’re aiming to do is flip that model on its head. So we’ve got the individual firm qualities driving a bigger influence on the rating and the model than the legacy market. How do we do that? One more click Phil. It feels very weird doing this. Just watch this build for a second, this sort of encapsulates a lot of what we’ve changed. So firstly, we’ve changed our proposal data and our proposal form to a full online journey. So we’re collecting the information electronically. This sounds quite scary coming from the financial adviser sector, as I have, that the lack of information that’s actually analysed or retained electronically, in the PI insurance space is staggering; there’s very little retention of information. Last year’s application is looked at, and then it goes effectively off to one side and then at renewal there’s a brand new application, and they look at that new application so it’s reliant on the underwriter’s memory and on the underwriter’s opinion, very heavily. What we’re doing by moving the proposal form online is gathering information in a consistent format, which gives us the ability to analyse it, it means we can connect to the FCA register and Companies House and pull that information into there, it means we can pull claims information through and feed that into the overall data lake as it were of information that we’re gathering, and all of that then can feed into a proper, company-specific rating model. So it’s a data led decision, rather than an arbitrary decision. Don’t get me wrong, and a really important point to make here, all the way through this process, while we’re using technology as an enabler, we’re not getting rid of the human. There is still an individual that’s looking at all of that data, all of that output, having involvement and making those decisions. And you’ve still got humans to deal with at the end of the phone, etc. Okay, do you want to click on? All of this links to our big strapline. Our strapline is Good companies, in good company ®, because all of this is to get to a better outcome for our customers. So if we click again, we’ll just talk about the club that we’ve just set up. Within the service, there are three club memberships. The entry point, the club membership, don’t underestimate getting into the club, we’ve set quite a high bar, we’re not going to be taking every firm. We don’t want to bring in firms that are going to give an undue contagion risk to the people we insure. Because, as we know, the premise of insurance is fundamentally that the masses pay for the claims of the few, that’s simplistically how insurance works. But if over the whole of our population, we’ve got a safer and lower risk population, then that contagion risk has less of an impact and we can drive them through and reward firms for better behaviour through that logic. So, the better a firm’s systems, controls, and processes are, the more points they get in our segmentation in the background, and they can go to a club 10 membership, a club 20 membership, and those membership levels pass through to direct discount. If we click one more. Just to sort of summarise what I’ve just said there, the whole premise of what we’re launching here is a whole new ecosystem of PII, we’ve totally re-engineered it, we’ve moved it all online, we’re analysing the data properly and the end result is that we want to filter out and work with good companies so that they sit in a safer environment and they’ve not got that risk of contagion. And we can then pass on to and reward good firms, elite firms with better premiums.

Phil Bray 

Thanks John. Data lake, I’ve never heard that one before, I’m going to use that. Thank you for doing that John, in two or three minutes there’s only so much you could have said. So we are going to get John to email everybody who’s attending today with a bit more information. If you don’t want that email, just tell Dan, and we’ll make sure you don’t get that email. So PI insurance to one side, let’s assume your PI insurer is either not aware that you’re doing this because you’ve decided not to tell them you’ve taken that route, or you’ve got them on board. How do we run a successful client survey project? So we’re going to get really granular now about how to run a successful project. The first thing is to agree the information that you want to understand, work backwards, what do you want to get out of this survey? And then that will dictate the questions that you ask. We suggest in step two, when you develop the questions, that you have 15 to 20. Some of those questions are really simple, yes and no answers, some of them would be not necessarily scales, but multi-choice answers, and others would be pretext. So two of my favourite questions, for example, in the survey that we run, are “What’s the best thing about working with *insert the name of the firm*?” That gets you a lot of positive feedback, it makes you feel really good, and we bookend that question with, “If you were in charge of the business for a day, what would you change about the business?” Now, what you get there, apart from a few people making jokes about biscuits and the quality of the coffee, what you get is you’re giving someone permission to basically say anything. You’re giving them a safe space to say anything and that question goes down really well. The third question that I love is “Is there any member of the team that you want to single out for some praise?” And what you end up with then, is your clients name checking people who often don’t get name-checked, support staff, paraplanners, administrators, receptionists, those staff. And then you can disseminate that positive feedback throughout the business. So 15 to 20 questions, maximum of about five minutes to complete, mix up the style of questions. There’s one of our blog articles that Abi is going to put in the follow up, that talks about different style of questions. Then, when you’re working out the questions, think about how you’re going to use the answers. For me, it’s a bit of a filter, a bit of a double check. If you can’t think “How are we going to use this answer to improve the business/ in our marketing/ to generate referrals?” If we don’t know how we’re going to use the answer, then probably the question should be taken out. So it’s a really useful filter. Then build and test the survey. We use Survey Monkey for sending surveys out, it’s not perfect, but it’s pretty good and clearly, it can have your branding on there. But really road-test the survey, get different people to complete it and try it, really kick the tires on it because once it’s out within your clients, if there are mistakes on it, that’s an issue. Obviously, you can delete the results and the answers that any of the testers give. Step one, agree what you want to be finding out, step two, develop the questions to make sure you find out everything in step one, step 3, build and test the survey. We then need to try and maximise the responses. So here’s what we would do. Day one of whenever you’re doing this, send a heads-up email, “We’re just giving you the heads up, we’re doing this, the survey will be with you in a few days, it would be really beneficial to us if you complete the survey. It will help us help you, it’ll help us improve the business, it will help us give a better service.” Then, three days afterwards, day four, send the survey out. That’s your initial send of the survey. Two weeks later, a reminder. Don’t send you a reminder if you can avoid it to people who have already completed the survey, because you’ll get people saying I thought I’d done this. Then at the end of that process, around 30 days, close the survey. In our experience with the vast majority of firms, that is enough to get a response rate in the 30% to 40% range. There are other things you can do though, to boost completion rates. One of the things we’ve seen a few firms do, is use WhatsApp. One of the questions we ask in client service is “What social media platforms do you use?” 85% to 90% of advised clients, and this is interesting bearing in mind their average age, use WhatsApp on a regular basis. So we can harness the power of WhatsApp when it comes to client surveys, and we’ve seen a couple of firms where response rates were relatively low, I can think of one firm in Ireland that had 28 or 29 responses. The wife of the MD sat on his WhatsApp account at night and sent out messages. The next day, we had 79 responses in total. It went up massively by around 50 responses. And it was partly the timing, and it was partly the method of communication. So sending that out via WhatsApp seemed to work quite nicely. Of course, you’re not communicating any personal data, there’s no security risk, because you’re just sending a link to a survey. We’ve seen other firms pick up the phone to clients and say, “Would you mind completing it? We send you the link, can we nudge you this way?” And then we’ve seen a few firms where all their clients don’t have email, they have elderly client banks, and they’ve sent out printed versions. They put an envelope in along with the survey, sent it back, and then they’ve entered the details electronically, so we’ve got one source of truth, we’ve got all the answers in the same data lake. There’s a bunch of things you can do to increase the completion rate, because we should be aiming at that 30% to 40% mark.

John Netting 

Can I just jump in, and add one more thing to that? One thing I’ve also seen work really well, is to get the adviser at the end of appointments to say, “Look, we will be sending out surveys, it’s really useful. I’d really value your response.” I think the request personally from the individual who’s dealt with the client alongside your methods I’ve seen work really well and increase response rates. As much as it’s a safe place the survey, I think sometimes clients think “I don’t want to drop my adviser in it, I like my adviser, this is great.” So I think having the affirmation from the adviser as well that they would like this feedback can be really valuable. It works both ways that safe space, by the way. Sometimes the survey coming from somebody that isn’t the adviser also increases response rates, by the way. So it’s good to get the adviser endorse and ask for responses, but then the survey go out from somebody that isn’t the adviser in my experience.

Phil Bray 

Yes, that sounds like a perfect scenario. Dan, you’ve got a question about questions from Mike, I think.

Dan Campbell 

Yes, I do. So we’ve got a question about the negatives haven’t we? So let’s talk about a couple of the questions about questions. So Daniel’s question first before Mike’s. Daniel asks, “Does it work to put negatively framed questions into the survey? For example, what do you think we should improve on?” So it’s a leading question there, isn’t it?

Phil Bray 

I think we potentially do that. Maybe not a negatively framed question, but certainly a questions framed in a safe space, tell us anything, we want absolutely want to know. There are probably people more qualified than me to talk about this but I would probably avoid leading the witness positively or negatively and try and ask questions in a neutral way. John, what would you say to that?

John Netting 

I would agree. I think asking for genuine feedback and open feedback is one thing, but I think negatively framing is almost putting it in their head that there is something wrong, and that you’re expecting to answer something wrong. This isn’t so much a compliance point, I think this is more of a behavioural science point, but I think I would always be positive about what you’re asking because you’re expecting positive feedback. And you’re trying to elicit the positive with the openness of if there is something better, we want to know. I also think, by the way, I was wondering when to weave this in so whilst I’m talking, I might just drop this in. There’ve been a few really interesting and positive suggestions from the regulator about trying to get the client to repeat back the benefit of the transaction or advice they were given in their own words because it helps show, I’ve got this far without mentioning consumer duty but from a consumer duty point of view, having that positive affirmation that they understood what they’ve done and why they’ve done it, in their own words, is incredibly powerful. So I love the open free text questions, I think having an open free text that’s “In your own words. Why did why did you do this transaction? What’s your understanding of why we advise this transaction?” Those kinds of open questions, I think are really powerful. I’m looking at a bit of an exercise on that in the background at the moment to see whether there’s something we can come up with to give some pointers on that, but there’s no reason you couldn’t build that into a server.

Dan Campbell 

Brill. Mike asked a question earlier about the questions. A question about questions. And it’s “Will we be providing the questions as a starter template?”

Phil Bray 

We won’t, Mike, we are pretty giving, and we have that motto, give information away for free, charge for implementation. And for me, those questions fall on the implementation side of the line. We will, however, talk very shortly about how we can help firms run client surveys, I’ll even tell you the cost.

Dan Campbell 

Brill, and can I just sneak a question in from Nick? So a friend of Yardstick, Nick, I hope it’s sunnier in Stourbridge than it is in the East Midlands. Nick says “I’m new to the sector, is there a requirement on us to get permission from our PI insurer before running a survey?”

Phil Bray 

John, you can take that.

John Netting 

The short answer is yes, I would most definitely. They’ll probably want to see the survey and hopefully there won’t be a barrier to it. I’m a little shocked and surprised these days, that there is still a barrier in that regard but it’s never the right thing to dodge asking them and doing it without their knowledge. There’s that old adage, isn’t there of ask for forgiveness later, but I don’t think that works in this context. If you did get a claim through that survey, and you hadn’t told them you were doing surveys or asked for consent, you could invalidate your cover because they might view that as you invited that complaint without consent. So I most definitely would ask for consent, I think there’s an inherent risk of not doing I’m afraid.

Phil Bray 

Thank you, John.

Dan Campbell 

I just want to sneak one question in rather than at the end, if that’s okay?

Phil Bray 

Go on Dan.

Dan Campbell 

So, another familiar face Darren. Darren asks, “Do the number of responses vary, depending on what day of the week you send it out? What have we found?”

Phil Bray 

I think it potentially could. We like client surveys going out when people’s inboxes are a little bit quieter. So evenings, weekends, as opposed to three o’clock on a Friday afternoon or 11 o’clock on a Wednesday morning. So yeah, I think it potentially could Darren, yes. Right, step five, still talking about how to run surveys and then we’ll talk about things you do afterwards, although, this is post survey. After you’ve done the survey, you really need to analyse the results. Review the results at a macro level and at a micro individual client level. Then, take individual actions at that micro level. So for those clients who have said, this could be improved, I’d like to do this. I’m not happy about this, you’ve got to pick up the phone. Go early, go verbal. I heard that from next month’s webinar guest which we’ll announce in a minute. But go early, go verbal when you’ve got a problem. It might be the adviser picking up the phone might be someone more senior picking up the phone. But I think there’s something incredibly powerful in a client saying something and then you taking action and them knowing that you have taken action. So, individual actions based on individual feedback, then build project plans for larger tasks. For example, I was delivering the client survey results to a firm that we worked with last week, and 50% of their clients had never logged into their portal. There’s a project there to increase awareness about the portal, explain the benefits, explain how to do it, because the majority of their for clients who did log in, we’re very happy. Then, we need to think about how to use the data in your marketing, which of those data points can we use in your marketing? Lastly, and I think this is, as far as I’m concerned, unique to Yardstick, we believe you should publish the results. Quite often when we say that, advisers get a little bit nervous. Now clearly you are publishing an edited version of the results. If you’re going to only publish the results that you want to, but for me, it’s really important that you close the loop. You’ve asked these people questions, they’ve spent 10 minutes, five minutes, however long, filling in the survey, if the information appears to fall into a void and they never hear anything back, I think they’re less likely to complete the survey in the future, they’re going to see less benefit in doing it. So I would recommend publishing the results and email to all clients, including those who didn’t complete it, because it shows those people that there was benefit in doing it, explaining what you’re pleased about, what you’ve learned, and what you’re going to change because of the client survey. It’s very important to do that. I see too many firms, doing steps 1, 2, 3, and 4, but not analysing, and not publishing the results. So I think that’s incredibly important. Those are the six steps to running a successful survey. Things that you should do afterwards. We have covered some of these, but here are the things you should do afterwards: picking up the phone to clients who provide critical or constructively critical feedback, there is generally one or two in most client banks who might be having a bad day, or might have genuine grievances. This is an important point, if you do have that person in there, in my experience, advisers and firm owners react in one of two ways. The first way is they take it on board and they work out a plan to turn that client around, they see it as a challenge to turn that client around from somebody who is potentially a detractor into an advocate. One of the ways of doing that is go verbal, go early. Other advisers and firm owners will roll their eyes and say, “Oh, I know that client, they would say that, wouldn’t they.” and they deflect and it is a defence mechanism, which I understand. But it’s so important that we pick up the phone to client to provide critical feedback.

John Netting 

Sorry Phil, I’m going to jump in and apologies for jumping in.

Phil Bray 

That’s fine.

John Netting 

I think it’s particularly important that if there’s any hint that it’s an expression of dissatisfaction that you do pick up the phone instantaneously as well don’t leave that sat in the to-do pile. Partially because if it could be construed as a complaint, obviously, you be expected to record it as a complaint, respond to it as a complaint, or at the very minimum notifying or PI insurer of the potential circumstance that could lead to a complaint. If you deal with it instantaneously, certainly with ourselves, we make allowance for the three day rule, where if you deal with something to a client’s satisfaction, you don’t have to record it as a complaint. So picking the phone up straightaway, just to clarify that point and to make sure whether it was constructive feedback for you to benefit from or whether they actually were, in some way, shape, or form making a complaint. So make sure you’re dealing with it within those three days.

Phil Bray 

That three day rule is massively important. Number three, share the results with your team. It’s really important that you tell the team, it gives them a boost that they’re doing a good job, helps them understand how they can improve, and if you include that last question we talked about, you’ll have individual feedback for individual members of the team. Then, put the results of the survey for Mr. Smith, Mrs. Jones, etc. on their client file, so that the advisers can discuss the results of the survey, when they go out and do the next review meeting, forward planning meeting, whatever you call it. In that meeting pick up little points and debate the barriers about referrals, if they have recommended you to someone in the last 12 months who hasn’t got in touch, use that as a conversation starter. So, put the answers on each of your clients folders, their files. Update your website with key points “Our survey says X, Y, Z” and you could animate that, there’s all sorts of things you could do with it. You could create an infographic, you create an animation. We’ll send some examples of those in the follow-up to this webinar. Start distributing the results of those surveys. Use the data in your award entries. When you enter awards, whether it’s PFS, Money Marketing, Professional Adviser or whatever awards you decide to enter, one of the key things that differentiates your entry from other people’s is showing evidence to support your claims. Let’s say there are two award entries, one says “Our clients are happy.” The other one says “Our clients are happy and here’s the proof from our survey.” and quotes the numbers from the survey, which is more powerful? Telling or showing? Clearly, showing. So, use the data in your award entries. Use the data to start conversations with clients about referrals and recommendations, such as “You said in the survey, you would recommend us on to other people. Can we talk a little bit about who you could recommend us to, how to do it, and when to do it?” “You said in the survey you’ve recommended us to somebody in the past 12 months, my records show nobody’s got in touch. Just tell me a little bit about who you recommended us to.” And then lastly, still on recommendations and referrals, your survey helps you deal with barriers to recommending it’s one of the questions we ask, it’s a free type box, and we do see – to answer a question that came in earlier – in free type boxes, sometimes the answers are really long. People do complete them. One of the questions we ask that’s free type is “What are the barriers to recommending us?” and you get some really useful information there. That’s 10 things you should be doing after you’ve run the client survey. Again, in the follow-up notes you’ll see we’ve written an article about this in the past and you can see some more details there. As we wrap up, we’ve spoken about the reasons you should run surveys, we’ve spoken about when you should do them, we’ve spoken about how to do them and what happens afterwards. So briefly, how Yardstick can help. The first thing we can do is we can run the project for you. We can agree with you the questions, build it in SurveyMonkey, send it out, help with the reminders, do the analysis for you. It’s one of my favourite things I do 90 minutes, telling firms how their clients feel about them. It’s a lovely, lovely call. We can write the follow-up email, we can update the website, we can build the animations, the infographics, we can do all of that. To run the project though, up to the point where we present the results and write the follow-up email, we charge £750 plus VAT. Things like infographics are an additional cost because not everybody wants them. But to run the project, we charge £750 plus VAT. Then we can help you to promote the results with website updates, infographics, and animations. But I’m not going to turn this into a commercial for Yardstick. If you are interested, just pop a note to Abi and we can have a conversation. We’re going to go through any questions as a bit of a wrap up. Before that, I do want to publicise our next webinar. It’s at 10am on Wednesday 19 June. One of the things we’re trying to do is bring experts into these webinars moving forward. We had Rory Sutherland last month, we have John this month kindly attending and sharing his wisdom, and next month we’ve got Andy Bounds. Andy Bounds is a superb marketer, sales expert, and communication expert. If you get his Tuesday email, it’s absolutely fabulous. We’re very lucky to have Andy joining us next month. Abi, if you could put a link to the webinar in the chat, that would be great. Do sign up for it, Andy is superb. As always, our webinars are free. Nottingham’s council house bells are ringing. Here’s how you stay in touch with myself or John. Dan, any questions?

Dan Campbell 

Yes. So we’ll sweep up a few. Obviously, if you’ve got any last minute ones, pop them through, and we’ll see how we get on. So Nicola’s question will be the first one. Nicola asks, “Do you suggest sending surveys to clients post-meeting or sending to your full client bank in one go at one time?”

Phil Bray 

Full client bank in one go at one time. For the reasons I spoke about earlier, you get a higher completion rate, you can compare one fixed point to another fixed point in time more easily, and it leaves open the opportunity to request a Google and VouchedFor review after you’ve done an annual review meeting.

Dan Campbell 

Lovely. Let’s go to Jonathan’s question next. Jonathan makes a good challenge about the number of questions. “15 to 20 questions seems quite long, especially in this day and age where people are bombarded with surveys. Would fewer for example 10 to 12 not be more engaging for a client and improve response rates?”

Phil Bray 

I think this is subjective. Some clients will say “10 is the maximum I would feel comfortable doing.” for some it’s 20, for some it’s 30. So, the first thing I would say is experiment. The second thing I would say is the drop off rate, which is someone getting halfway through and stopping completion of the survey, when you ask 15 to 20 questions that we’ve seen and we’ve run over 100 of these projects now, is really low. So once someone started, they do get to the end. Whether it’s a barrier for them starting, it’s a fair challenge, but right now, we see people happy to get to the end. Try it! Try both and see what happens.

John Netting 

It’s always good from a behavioural point of view – I believe I’m talking about behavioural science more than compliance today, which is rather unlike me – to let them know at the outset, how many questions it is, how long it’s going to take, make sure they understand that because I find that as long as they know, it’s going to be 20 questions that they are normally quite happy. If you’ve gone into a survey thinking there might be two or three, and then you’re at eight or nine, that’s when you drop off. If you go in knowing there’s 20, you’ve gone into it when you’ve got time to answer 20.

Phil Bray 

Yeah, I agree with that completely. The other thing I would say is, you could have 20 questions that require long, free type answers, or you can have 20 binary yes or no questions. It’s down to the style of question as well. But give it a go Johnathan, try it, play around with it.

Dan Campbell 

Brilliant. And that reiterates Mike’s point that he made earlier in the chat, where he says one of the problems with free text questions is they take longer to complete. Pepper some speedy questions in there to change it up. Now, I believe this is the final question. So anybody that I’ve missed, pop those through so I can see them again. Richard asks, “Are you aware of any software that allows us to use a generic mobile, to send WhatsApp messages to clients so that the process can be mechanised instead of having to get advisers to do it?”

Phil Bray 

Yeah, we’re doing a bit of work at the moment. Brandon, in the client success team is doing some work around business WhatsApp. So expect a blog out from us, an article, even maybe a definitive guide about how to use WhatsApp in your business because we’ve got a couple of competing things here. We have got clients 85% to 90% of people using WhatsApp on a regular basis, but the majority of firms do not. Some of it is because they don’t use WhatsApp themselves, some of it is because they don’t know how to do it, and some of it is a bit of concern about the regulator. Watch this space, we’ll have some stuff coming out on that.

Dan Campbell 

Wonderful. In the spirit of closure for everybody who was on the edge of their seats. Sadly, it is still chucking it down in the West Midlands for Nick. So there is that I’m afraid.

Phil Bray 

And it’s throwing it down here. Thank you to everybody attending today, I hope you got some value from that. We will be mailing out a load of stuff this afternoon including a recording. Lance, I saw you ask a question about whether the Andy Bounds webinar will be recorded, it absolutely will be. If you register, we’ll send that recording to you. Otherwise, thanks for your interaction, it makes these webinars so much more enjoyable. See you soon everybody, bye bye.

Dan Campbell 

Thanks, guys. Bye.