It’s essential to understand your clients’ expectations and needs. What your clients expect and want from financial advice services might not be exactly as you think, especially regarding service processes. Pinning down the most common demands and requirements is essential if you want to enhance overall client experiences and keep them coming back.

In this post, we’ll be expanding on this further with the best ways to uncover clients’ needs in the financial services industry. And as always, you can contact WEBPRO Adviser for tailored help and support.

Why you need to uncover client needs

As already mentioned, the overarching benefit of uncovering client needs is to improve your service. But there are additional benefits, especially in the financial services industry where so much business comes from referrals, and where bespoke customer service is so important.

If you can make your current clients as happy and satisfied as possible, they’re much more likely to come back to you when they need further financial services, which is highly likely as they move through stages of life (e.g. buying a home, taking out insurance, pensions, etc.).

Moreover, they’re more likely to refer their friends and family to your business, which typically makes up a large part of lead generation in the industry. On top of this, satisfied clients are more likely to leave positive reviews online, which is good for your website’s SEO ranking. And you guessed it, therefore generate more website leads as well.

How to uncover client needs

The best way to learn your clients’ exact needs and expectations is to follow up with them after you’ve provided them with a service. You need to ask clients that have received a full service what they enjoyed most about the service, and areas where you can improve.

Using surveys is typically the best way of asking these questions. You can use closed and open-ended questions to understand how they experienced your service. If you start to see similar answers on where to improve, you should consider making adjustments to this part of your service. You could even get technical with statistics to understand what common answers are considered statistically significant regarding the number of people surveyed, and which ones aren’t.

You may need to adapt surveys for clients who used different services. As your processes may be different depending on the service, there might be a need to use different survey questions.

Platforms to create surveys

There are scores of platforms where you can create a free survey such as Mailchimp and SurveyMonkey. Once your survey is ready, you then simply send clients an email with the link to complete the it.

Many clients ask us how can they encourage people to take the time to fill out the survey, and our advice is:

• Don’t make the survey too long 
• Think about what you really want to know so questions are relevant and to the point 
• Test your survey with a pilot survey before launching so there is no misunderstanding 
• Provide good customer service in the first place, so people want to help you out 
• Incentivise surveys by adding participants to a draw for a redeemable discount in the future. This has the added bonus of bringing clients back for repeat business!

Online surveys are good because they are convenient for the participants. They can fill them out on their schedule at a time to suit them. The alternative is to complete surveys with a quick phone call, but the effectiveness of these is usually dependent on the timing of the call and if the client is available to complete the survey at that moment. Talking to a real person could also discourage more honest feedback.

Survey design at WEBPRO Adviser

Using surveys is a fanatic way to enhance your service and improve client satisfaction. This is especially important when businesses rely on client referrals frequently, such as financial service businesses.

But creating an effective survey that provides relevant and useful data isn’t as straightforward as it sounds. Our market research team has already helped scores of financial services businesses to understand client needs and refine their service.

We can assist by creating, testing and launching surveys ready for your clients. We can even help analyse results and help you use the data to refine other areas, such as your website content and online marketing strategies.