Marie, the floor is yours. All right. I cannot believe it's already 2023 and welcome back to all of you who are rejoining us again for another great year of the NAPFA playbook series. We're starting off our first trilogy of the year and focusing on improving the client experience and attracting ideal clients. And today we're going to be focusing in on one aspect of that and that is measuring client satisfaction and hopefully gathering testimonials and referrals in the process. So we want to focus on moving clients from simply satisfied to raving fans and sparking those referrals and introductions and doing it in a way that's comfortable for you. So it really is satisfying for you and for them. It's just a great experience and a great way to grow your business in a graceful way. And we're joined today by a number of great experts. I'm going to introduce them in just a minute, but let's go to the next slide. For those of you who don't know me, just a quick little visual that I have been a friend of NAPFA for many, many years, and I've had the pleasure and privilege of hosting the playbook series since 2019, as you can see here on the slide. And since 2020, I have been the host of the NAPFA podcast. The first two years, it was called Mindset Mastery and those archives you can find right on the NAPFA site under the education and learning area that Heidi was just talking about. But then this year we rebranded the podcast and we're taking a slightly different approach and we're calling it NAPFA Nation. So there is a button right on that podcast page where if you'd like to be a guest on the program, you simply click that button and fill out the form. And who knows, we may ask you to schedule a time and be one of our guests. We've got a great lineup this year for the NAPFA playbook series, as well as the podcast. And of course, I've been writing for NAPFA advisor magazine for many years. And Johnny also has an article coming out very soon and he'll talk a little bit more about what he may be contributing to the magazine going forward. Again, Marie Swift Impact Communications, and I'm the founder and CEO. So let's get started with our first duo. The way that we have scheduled this is we have three guest experts. The first one is Johnny Swift from Impact Communications. Then we'll go to Chris Manker from Nixa Insights. And finally, Julie Littlechild from Absolute Engagement. But not only do we have three guest experts, we have three guest advisors who are going to serve as a duo or a tag team with each of our experts. So our first advisor guest joining Johnny Swift is Charlie. Charlie Lutz from Intercontinental Wealth Advisors down in San Antonio. Charlie, if you want to wave your hand, we know that you're here to talk with Johnny about how you have been using client feedback in your RA firm to enhance client relationships, to understand your clients better, to create just a better process all the way around. And you have had the good luck of gathering a number of great testimonials as well. Now, for those of you who don't know Johnny, he's my partner, the VP here of Impact Communications. He's the head of our digital strategy. And many of you who have been attending these playbook series have heard from Johnny in the past, and you'll be hearing from him in the future as well as we dig deeper into the year. But without further ado, Johnny, would you take it away and share a little bit about what you and Charlie brought to share? Yeah. So we'll be starting off this session here today talking about how, if you want to do a surveying process in-house, kind of a homegrown survey, which is what we did with Intercontinental. And one of our main goals was to collect testimonials and also get some client sentiment. So we'll dive into that in a minute. But before we do, Charlie, I wanted to just ask you why you all decided at Intercontinental that you wanted to collect testimonials and do this survey process in-house and independently rather than using an outsourced tool or solution? Thanks, Johnny. And thanks for including me this afternoon. I'll give you a couple of reasons why we decided to do it in-house. The first one that comes to mind was an advertising campaign, print advertising, that we undertook 12 or 14 years ago, long before we knew you, Johnny and Marie. It was a series of print ads that we called Now That's a Success. And we wrote a vignette, excuse me, or narrative about a dozen or more of our clients. And we sort of teed up the story. And we used a picture. And we titled them Success Story Number One, Success Story Number Five, and so on. And then at the end of the story, we said, or the ad, we said, Now That's a Success. And they were extremely successful. We didn't, we used artificial names. And we used stock pictures. But our clients knew we were doing this. And it told the story of our impact in their financial and in their personal lives and those of their families. So I was very disappointed when our compliance people came to me and told me we had to quit doing that. So I had continually looked forward to doing testimonials again. The second thing, briefly, Johnny, you'll remember that early in our relationship with Impact, you helped us put together a client advisory council. And we had our first dinner meeting with that council, about 25 clients, right before COVID. And it was the most incredibly rewarding, almost heartwarming scenario for us to sit and listen to these clients talk openly and in front of other clients, many of whom they did not know about the impact our firm and we as individual advisors were having on them and their families and, and their financial lives. And that event in the beginning of that council process gave me confidence that we could ask our clients to say something about us and that they probably would. That's great, great context there. So with that, we're going to dig into our goals and then our process and then our outcomes. So first up were our goals before implementing this survey. One of our main goals was to take advantage of the new SSE marketing rule, allowing testimonials and endorsements in marketing efforts. And we also wanted to gather testimonials that provided credibility and proof of Intercontinental's great service to their clients. So we also were interested in giving a voice to some of the firm's best clients in their online presence, and that would allow the clients to feel heard and valued. And then we also wanted to provide additional resources to the firm's advisors when courting prospects and when following up with leads and also gain an advantage over the firm's competitors that aren't featuring client testimonials. It allowed us to collect great content for the website, for emails and social media that positioned the firm favorably. And also boosting the firm's SEO and online presence was really important, which we were able to do by converting some of the comments into Google reviews, which we'll discuss in a little bit. And then also, as Charlie said, augment what the firm learned from those client advisory board meetings that they did before COVID. So, Charlie, before I move on, what were the biggest and most important goals in your mind? So I think when I will tell everyone we got underway with Impact, as you know, Johnny, four years ago, you began talking about building a funnel. And at that point, our website was pretty rudimentary and we really we didn't have a social media presence at all. So you've talked and talked and talked about this funnel over the many months that you built it. And to me, reaching out or for me reaching out to clients and asking for testimonials was just the logical next step in building that funnel and getting information down into our website and out into our social media presence. That would give affirming information about relationships with our firm that presumably and hopefully would be appealing to prospective clients. And that has worked quite well. And then another goal, and maybe I should have mentioned this one first, was to make sure our clients knew and others knew that we're listening to our clients and that we appreciate hearing from them. Yep. Well said. So our process for setting up this survey and taking this endeavor on was first, we, of course, reviewed that new SEC marketing rule. We consulted with the internal compliance officer. I also consulted with a compliance attorney to make sure we knew what we could going into this. And then we developed the disclosure statement that was going to be displayed alongside the testimonial. So there are three main components that need to be included in that disclosure statement, I'll say. And that's just your relationship with the testimonial giver, whether they're a client, current client or past client or some other kind of relationship, whether they were paid for their testimonial, for their comments, compensated in any way. So obviously, in most cases, I would not recommend doing that. You should be able to get some good comments out of your best clients without having to do that. And then the third element is just if there were any material conflicts of interest between the firm and the client. And in most cases, there should not be. So that makes up a good disclosure statement to display alongside testimonials if you're going to undertake this. But the next step here was to come up with the questions that we wanted to ask the clients that would elicit the types of responses we were hoping to receive. So we'll show off some of those questions here in a little bit, but questions that would really draw out some good comments that we could craft into testimonials. And then we created the survey through SurveyMonkey, Formstack, Google Forms. And there are other good options available out there if you're looking to do this on your own that are either free or relatively cheap. Then we determined which clients we wanted to invite to fill out the survey. So Charlie, let me ask you, how did you all determine which clients you wanted to ask to participate? I'll be honest, Johnny, we went first to the low-hanging fruit, and that was the clients who participated with the Client Advisory Council. And we had a good idea that they would be willing to speak publicly about us. And most of them did agree to do it. So that's where we started, and it has grown from that point. Yeah, yeah, that's a great strategy. And also just think about which clients you have the best relationship with and who would be willing to say favorable things about you. I've talked at length with a couple of different compliance officers and attorneys about this. And from their understanding, it is okay to cherry-pick certain clients that you want to ask to participate, as long as you're including the proper disclosure language when you display their comments. So with that, the next step in the process was we drafted up an email that we were sending out to the select group of clients with a personalized message and a link, an invitation to complete the survey. After we collected survey responses, we analyzed them, and then we combined the best elements into full-fleshed paragraph form testimonials. And then we sent the proposed testimonial to each client to see if they were okay with it, if they were approved of it, if they wanted to make any edits, and if they were okay with us using it in our online presence along with their name. And they all said that they were okay with that. And so then we also asked them to leave the same comments on the Google Business page. And of course, when they did provide comments there, we responded right away with the proper disclosure statement. We also gave them a big thank you for doing so, of course. But getting those comments on the Google Business page really helped out with SEO as well, just because that Google Business profile is one of the first and most prominent things that show up when anyone Googles or searches for your firm or your name. And then once approved, we added their comments to a newly created testimonials page on the website. We started working them into email templates, and we also created graphics to share on social media. We'll show those off here in a minute. And then we promoted the testimonials to prospects and the firm's entire audience to build credibility and show proof. And Charlie, I know some members of your firm were a bit hesitant to move forward with this initiative, maybe even a bit nervous about asking certain clients. But what got you all over the hump and made you feel comfortable enough to move forward? And how did you convince some more hesitant team members that this was a worthwhile initiative? Johnny, you persuaded me and then I persuaded my associates. Yeah, they were reticent. Some were about this process or doing this. And I think it has as much as anything to do with the way we develop business and have for more than 40 years. And that's a one on one approach. And we create these incredibly close relationships with our clients. And I guess some of our associates thought that was such a personal or intimate relationship that maybe it would somehow be a violation of that. Ask them to identify themselves publicly as clients of ours. But, you know, once we got started, once I reminded them, asked them to reflect on that client advisory experience we had had. And anyway, we got underway and here we are today. So thanks. Thanks. Thanks for being persuasive, Johnny. Of course, I think it's definitely a worthwhile initiative. With that, I want to show off a screenshot of the survey that we created on SurveyMonkey. So this is just the landing page and had a short intro and we adopted a lot of the same language for the email we sent out to invite clients to participate. But pretty much just as letting them know that under the new SEC rule, we were able to start collecting and displaying testimonials on our online presence. We asked them if they'd be willing to participate and let them know how much we would appreciate doing so. And here are a few of the questions that, like we said, we put together to try and elicit the types of responses we were hoping to receive. But tell us why and tell us in a few sentences why you have or why you would recommend Intercontinental to a friend or colleague. How have you benefited by working with Intercontinental? What's been the best thing that's come out of our working together? Think back to the beginning of our working relationship. How might things have turned out differently if we had not undertaken the course of action we did? So going a little bit beyond just why would you recommend Intercontinental and really trying to draw out some experiences that they can remember and how it has really benefited them. So with that, let's move on to our outcomes before I show some more examples of the different outcomes. But it gave a voice to some of the firm's best clients and allowed them to feel heard. Gave us great comments to share with prospects that provide proof and credibility. Allowed us to create that testimonials page on the website. We increased the Google reviews from testimonial givers, which helped with SEO, and it raised our Google star rating, which was great. Testimonials were featured in emails and also on social media. And here's one of those social media graphics we created. And actually, the next slide is actually just showing the LinkedIn post we made about it. And this performed really well on social media, and we're going to start posting more of these. But, you know, good clients are our best advocates. We're proud to share some comments from our amazing clients. We tagged the company of the gentleman who provided these remarks and thanked him for doing so. And obviously included that required disclosure language. But, you know, kind of this testimonial here speaks to, on top of being a client, they're also family friends. And he sees his advisors at Intercontinental as personal friends. So really speaking to the familial atmosphere at Intercontinental. And here's the website here. So here's the testimonials page on the website where we feature the handful of testimonials we collected. If you're interested in checking that out, you can go to this URL here. But in addition to the comments, we also included some old photos. You can see the first one here of Intercontinental at dinners and, you know, working with clients over the years. As Charlie said, they've been in business for over 40 years. And so we had a bunch of good old photos and didn't know where to use them. And then I realized a lot of these testimonials were kind of speaking to the decades of valuable advice Intercontinental has provided. And this seemed like the logical and perfect place for these photos to really give some history of the firm. You know, obviously none of the testimonial givers themselves are featured in these photos, but it just gives a feel for the firm, the familial atmosphere and the, you know, the decades of valuable advice that they've given to clients. And then here is how we've been using them in email. So Intercontinental does quarterly newsletters. The one at the end of the year was obviously around the holidays. So we included a holiday video from the team with photos and short video clips of team members giving holiday greetings. And we thought this testimonial was perfect to pair with the video. Working with Intercontinental is like coming to a friend for sound, sage advice. And so again, it's just giving off that friendly, familial atmosphere and how many of their clients see them more as just their advisors, but truly friends. And obviously this video is very friendly. And at the bottom there, you can see the disclosure language. And then we've also been including this section in a handful of emails, just a section, you know, letting the clients and prospects and their audience know that there's a new testimonials page on their website and, you know, inviting the audience to go check that out. Great to drive prospects to that webpage and then also inviting other clients to participate if they're willing. So Charlie, I know you've been getting great feedback over the past year or so from clients on these quarterly newsletters we've been producing. And I think that the testimonials have just given us another great element to make the newsletters more robust and impressive. And not only to your current client base, but to the prospects in your audience as well. Yeah, absolutely. I personally love the quarterly newsletter. I think the way it has evolved is particularly appealing to clients and prospective clients. It presents information about our firm and around the office update in an informal fashion that I think is interesting and well-received. The profiles that we do of associates of ours or within our firm are very well-received. People love being talked about and pictured, featured, I think. So it's really been a success within the firm. Within an hour of the December newsletter going out, Johnny, I think I told you I had an email from a client in Madrid who said she was really pleased to be reminded of the wonderfully refreshing diversity of our team at Intercontinental. And that made my day. So yeah, it's working. We like it. Great. Thank you. We are running out of time here, so I'm going to speed through these next couple of slides. But I did want to show an example of another firm who's an impact client who has done something similar, homegrown survey to collect testimonials. And on their website, they actually have a client experience section where they kind of feature different niches or ideal client profiles that they serve. They specialize in serving. So you can see that here. They're based in L.A. So they specialize in serving athletes, business owners, divorcees, high net worth families, retirees, and they made it a goal to collect a testimonial from someone who fell within each of these categories. Here you can see their little section on divorcees. And if you're interested, you can go check this out on their website at this URL here. And then here's the testimonial. So Alicia Ames was a divorcee that they helped through a tough divorce. And if you click read more, you can see her full testimonial where she speaks about how HCR helped her through that process. And so if you have a who we serve page on your website or something along those lines where you feature ideal client profiles, collecting testimonials from those types of clients and featuring them in that section is a really great way for prospects visiting your website that fall into those categories to put themselves in the shoes of the testimonial giver. And it just provides your firm with great proof and credibility that you've served clients like that before. And obviously they're very happy with the service. And then here's a social media graphic that we did for HCR. And you can see here that the testimonial giver is actually an NFL center. And he says that they make him feel like family whenever they speak or he goes into the office. So again, going back to that, it's more than just an advisor client relationship. And so our top takeaways, it was an easier process than we anticipated. Obviously there were a lot of different steps, but once we got going, it was easier than we anticipated. The clients were willing and excited to share their positive comments and sentiments and to have a voice in the firm's online presence. Charlie, I think a couple of clients you reached out to were pretty excited that they were asked to participate. Anything you can share about their comments? Yeah, just that they were delighted that we were interested in hearing from them and letting them tell the story and express the different ways we've served them or helped them. And yeah, great, great process, great experience. So yeah, yeah. Thank you. So then we produced the testimonials to share with prospects and use in marketing efforts, provided us with a lot of good content to work into the online presence, helped increase our SEO and online presence and helped the firm stand out from competitors that don't feature testimonials. And then again, it just augmented what we learned from the client advisory board meetings and allowed the firm to get some client sentiment. And so with that, those are our takeaways and process. And I do have a resource here to share. I did have an article on how advisors can utilize testimonials in their marketing efforts, both effectively and compliantly. And that came out in the 2023 Market Outlook issue of Wealth Management Magazine. So feel free to use this short URL to access that or you can email me and I can send you the link or the PDF. And then we also have a lot of great content on the Impact Communications blog, which you can get to by going to johnnyswiftic.com. But thank you again, Charlie, for joining us and chiming in. And I think that's it from us, Marie. Okay, we have a couple of questions related to compliance. So regarding state registered advisors, check with a compliance attorney or outside counsel. It depends on the state. I know that Lori Nidel, who is the compliance attorney that Johnny spoke with, she actually presented, I believe, Johnny at the fall NAFTA conference. So there may be a resource or some recording that NAFTA members. And so I don't wanna get too much into the weeds right now about compliance, but if you're state regulated, be sure that you get some counsel for your particular state. All of the advisors here today are SEC registered advisors. So I'm going to move on now to our next duo and hold the rest of the questions. So Chris Manker, you're up next, you and your guest, and we have Vince Crivello. Hi, Chris. I'm excited to see you again, Vince. Vince is the Director of Client Experience with St. Louis-based Buckingham Wealth Partners, and that's the parent company of Buckingham Strategic Wealth, which is an SEC registered investment advisor, and also Buckingham Strategic Partners, which is a service for advisors who want to spend more time holistically with their clients. And Chris, you are the founder of Nexa Insights, which is a different kind of a survey than what Johnny was just talking about. It's a satisfaction survey feedback mechanism. So I'm going to let you talk about how you look at surveys and client feedback, and then we want to make sure that we leave enough time for our last duo, which is Julie Littlechild with Joe Martin from Summitry. So Chris, take it away. All right, thanks, Maureen. Yeah, so I'm Chris Manker with Nexa Insights. We are certainly a little bit unique and different than what Johnny just presented. We're a little bit more of a structured program in that we have everything sort of laid out, so it makes it incredibly easy on advisors. We do a lot of the similar stuff. We'll collect testimonials, we'll facilitate Google reviews, but we also look at your firm from a holistic standpoint. So from a leadership point of view, you can really target strengths and weaknesses and eventually deliver a better overall client experience. We've worked with Buckingham and Benz now for the last three years, so it's been neat to see the product grow over the last three years. Also now it gives us trending data and our benchmarks have been much better over these last years. So Benz can kind of probably highlight the goals that were more Buckingham-specific a little bit better than I can. Benz, do you want to kind of tune in and chime in there? Yeah, so by way of context, I had also been involved in supporting the survey that Dimensional provides advisors prior to taking on this role at Buckingham. So for five years, I worked closely with Dimensional DFA on rolling out that survey and really collecting aggregated insights. I think looking back on our decision to go with Nexa is we really wanted actionable insights. So this is not an anonymous survey, so we know who's filling it out. And as such, we can understand how to deliver a better client experience as you see here on the slide, both in aggregate across all advisors, we're up to about 50 offices now, as well as at that individual client level. So really the primary objective was how do we deliver a better client experience and learn directly from our clients? From there, we can then start to prioritize internal investments and projects, whether it be training, whether it be new technology, whether it be an enhanced portal or an investment in investor education and various programs. So the survey really helps guide how we manage the business and the strategic planning process. If we go to the next point here, the other component here is there's an individual internally that came up with this catchphrase, which was managing by anecdote. In other words, oftentimes decisions were made or people would build perceptions around, we need to do X, Y, and Z because client ABC said this, or on the BSP side, the strategic partner side, we've also introduced an annual survey. And so now we have data-driven insights. And we'd like to say that we apply evidence-driven principles. So now we can learn and get statistically significant insight and really make decisions with data versus anecdotes or being biased by recency. All right. So from the process standpoint, Buckingham was certainly unique in that everything is bigger, right? But they all tend to follow the same rules. We're gonna select a set of questions. Next, it has a library of 80 questions, give or take that all advisors start from. What we found is that advisors tend to gravitate towards the same 15 to 20 questions on every survey. And so Nexus starts out every engagement with our best practices survey. And that's where we started out with Buckingham. And it's evolved over the years, but it gave us a good launching point. From there, we identified segmentation. One thing that we, almost all of our clients segment in some way, whether it's gold, platinum, silver, A, B, C, D, we'll segment on, they've had a full comprehensive financial plan performed or not. All these different things from age range to AUM, to revenue, to client onboarding date, to geolocations, all of that impacts satisfaction, how far you are from the office. So all these individual segments allow clients and advisors to measure their satisfaction based on each. And just like when you're shopping on Amazon, you can uncheck and check things. And so it regenerates all the data real time for you. So you can really see my platinum clients that are under the age of 60, what do they think of me versus my bronze clients that are over 75 and vice versa. And so those segmentations are an early thing that we decide on and load up as part of our client list. From there, we go through a data collection process like any survey. Our surveys average just a couple minutes. We have a fairly high participation rate. I like to, I'm pretty proud of it. It's something that's incredibly important from the surveys. We definitely gather feedback over the course of a few weeks. With this data, as it comes in, it's real time. So advisors have access to the data from day one. So your advisors are in there, they're looking at the data. Advisors can see only their clients. Other advisors can see an entire office. Leadership can see the whole entire survey response rate. So we're getting that real time information and their advisors are reacting to that real time as well. So as we identify things like an at-risk client, advisors are quickly able to follow that up, follow up with them to perform those sort of hard conversations real time. We're collecting referrals. So those referrals, we jump on quickly. It doesn't take long before someone forgets that they provided a survey response and so we're jumping on those as well. And of course, NEXA, the amount of data that comes in, especially someone at the level of Vince's Buckingham, it's just, it's astronomical. It's almost hard to organize and process. And so NEXA is there to help and things like the actual written feedback, we're evaluating that for sentiment and we're flagging the things that's most important for advisors to ensure that that important 7% or 8% of data is right in front and center in organized form. We then do a final analysis on the data. So at the end, everything's aggregated. And as Vince mentioned, we're statistically significant at that point. The first 24 hours, I try to caution advisors not to read too much into the data. It's early, it will solidify itself as we go through. At that point, advisors have already had access to the client level feedback. And then at that point, for Vince and the Buckingham, we really started, as he mentioned, identifying ways that we can use this data to find new and different third-party solutions, whether that be improving the client portal and those sort of things from that data. And for a minute- Chris, if I could- Yeah, go ahead, absolutely. I just wanted to add one point here. Chris mentioned the segmentation analysis. What we wanted to better understand was, what are those satisfaction levels and advocacy levels with three key subsegments? First, gender, male versus female, in this case, binary. Second, the next generation. So we're trying to understand how we're doing with Gen X and millennials and seeing if there's any material deltas. And importantly, the secondary client in the relationship. So this just didn't go out to the primary client. It went to the spouse who may be uninvolved. And we've seen some of the attrition data across the industry. So really trying to get ahead of any kind of attrition risk that might happen. And again, able to do this in real time. I was joking with Chris that I was watching our next data come in more often than I was watching the market. I mean, it's fascinating to see how things evolve during the surveying period. All right, so- Back over to you. And then from an outcome standpoint, and Vince can, I'll go through this real quick if Vince can expound on this, because this is really where the value comes in. And this is where he's able to then take it from up to the next level. Nexa did our job. We provided him with everything that he needs to then take action. And so we've measured overall satisfaction at this point. We've compared service levels. So we survey everyone at both the advisor level, the office level, and the overall firm. So we've got firms and offices that are higher performing than others. We've got advisors that are higher performing than others. And so it really allows leadership to step back and say, well, what's different? What's unique between these two individuals or these two offices? And Nexa provides the data. We shine the spotlight on it, right? But then they're able to take a step back and say, from a leadership standpoint, they know the firms, they know the advisors, they know the clients, they know the offices. And they can really see that and say, well, here's what's different. It could be a different set of clients being served. It could be a different service level being offered. It could be a different demographic of high net worth versus emerging market clients, which impacts satisfaction and expectations. From there, we've identified drivers of satisfaction. This is one thing that Nexa does very well. We've surveyed tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of individuals. And so Nexa has a benchmark set up. So instead of giving you a score, we give you a percentile. Instead of giving you the data that you don't understand, we give you a very clear picture of what's driving your organization. Just like you guys don't give performance reports without benching them against the S&P 500 or an index, we don't give satisfaction scores without benchmarking it against other peers, just like yourselves. And with that, we're able to develop key drivers. And to me, a key driver is something that actually, it's moving satisfaction, right? What's most important to your clients? What drives satisfaction? There's certain things that just don't move the needle. Surprisingly, technology is less of a satisfaction driver than most people think. But the relationship, the communication, the trust that advisors have with their clients, that's incredibly important. And every firm is a little bit different. So those drivers, we rank those and we tell you, here's what's most important, here's where your focus is. That allows us to really pinpoint those gaps in service. We can evaluate retention risk at the individual transaction level. Like Ben said, we can actually go down to the individual participant and look at responses. That's just a click away. And then we can facilitate the collection of referrals, testimonials, and Google reviews as well. So from a testimonial standpoint, when you look at it at a large firm or even a small firm, an average is about 18%. So of all the people that fill out a survey, 18% will provide a testimonial. We're talking large volumes of data to process. We've got an e-signature component to it. It's timestamps, it's non-coached because it's coming in through the survey. So it's an easy way to go ahead and collect those testimonials. And then of course, any advisory firm loves the sales and marketing opportunities that we identify. I like the at-risk clients. I think that retention is incredibly important. Most advisors tell me that all their clients are happy. That's not very important to them. So the sales and marketing, identifying opportunities to cross-sell, asking more targeted questions towards certain products that you might offer or services that you're now offering that are new, those sort of things to develop lists and generate lunch and learn sort of groups of individuals you can bring into the office or market too. So Vince, you can probably... articulate this a lot better than I can from the takeaways. Yeah, yeah. So I wanna emphasize a couple of things that Chris said. First, the opportunity for us to benchmark our firm against like firms in the broader wealth management industry. We saw the benchmarks through the DFA study, but now we are able to drill down at an office and an individual level to really understand where are we hitting the mark and where aren't we? There's a feature with the NEXA. I don't know how well it's used, but help me out here, Chris. It's looking for those anomalies within the relationship as well. So they might be incredibly satisfied, but there might be two or three outliers, I think you refer to it as, that may be dragging down on the relationship. Without the survey, advisors aren't gonna necessarily ask those questions. So incredible insights just beyond those CSAT drivers. The other thing that NEXA does is they run a regression so that we can look at, what are the key drivers of satisfaction? And then again, prioritize our spend accordingly. If we go to the next bullet. So a few things here, and Chris and I have had several conversations around that promoter score. And I'm absolutely looking forward to, excuse the pun, Julie speaking on this, because she does some phenomenal work around NPS and CSAT and really thinking about engagement. A lot of people get caught up on the NPS score and ours was fantastic this year as it has been the last two. But if you really wanna move the needle in terms of the experience, it's important to understand the relationship and what to rely on between NPS and CSAT. So Chris at NEXA really helps us clarify that. And we'll talk a little bit about other measures here in a moment. We do this on an annual basis, which allows us to also take a longitudinal look at the data and really understand those drivers and how they may evolve over time. And we have a really good foundation of data now that we're looking to bring in to our business intelligence tool to start to look at other things and cross-reference that data in terms of revenue flows, in terms of for ability, et cetera. I think one of the challenges here has been cultural. In other words, when we launched the survey three years ago, advisors had this impression that this was corporate looking to do some kind of survey and they thought we were gonna come after them and honestly reprimand them for being in a bottom quartile versus top quartile. It is not about that. And I think after three years now, we're starting to see a cultural shift and really advisors understanding that this is client driven, taking those fiduciary principles and really understanding how we can make a better impact on the experience and also identify opportunities to help those they care about. But we still struggled a little bit with tasks and follow-up from the survey. We're seeing improvements there. We have a whole program internally called the Feed Forward Program that really helps advisors leverage this data in one-on-one conversations with specific clients. Wanna go to the next slide. Finally, we talked a lot about CSAT and NPS. I continue to explore other measures, other listening posts, if you will, to gauge satisfaction and gauge perspective on our experience across multiple touch points. One area that we continue to look at is customer effort score. This is generally something that's used. For example, I'm setting up a internet service at a house today. And once that service is set up, presumably I'm gonna get a CES survey from AT&T saying how easy or how difficult was it to set up internet? So CES, customer effort score, is really more of a transactional score. We're exploring ways we might incorporate that into our broader client insights and the experience program. It might be after onboarding, it might be after a major transition, but it is something we continue to explore. With that, Chris, can I take the reins back? This has been fascinating, but we've got about 16 or 17 minutes. I wanna give Julie the floor next. One of the questions that's on the board is about a survey being anonymous or not anonymous and how that might impact the participation rate. So Chris, in 30 seconds or less, could you answer that question? And then maybe Julie, you can lead with your opinion on that and then jump right into your slides. Typically, your clients are overwhelmingly satisfied with the services you're providing. We see that in the data. And there are also partnerships in your success. And so they're willing to provide this information. And I think Charlie kind of hit on that as well. So anonymous or not anonymous, the participation rate is still gonna be fairly consistent because of the type of relationship that you have with your clients. Julie, take it away. I'm gonna work out the introductions and just please work it into your beginning slides. Wonderful, I'll comment on that. If you don't mind stopping sharing, then I can switch it over. So just as we're doing that, yeah, the approach that we've always taken with this is to make name optional. And the reason that we do that is because you get the best of both worlds, really. Everyone always has the opportunity not to include a name. So we just give them that option and we find that gets the best response rate. So thank you, Marie. And I'm so excited because I could listen to stuff on feedback all day long. This is what we live and breathe. And I am really excited to be here with Joe. So Joe, welcome. Thank you for joining. I appreciate it. And look, the approach that I thought we might take here is I'm gonna sort of run through the process and context, but then I as quickly wanna get over and spend most of the time talking to Joe because frankly, I could listen to him talk all day and it'll be a lot more exciting than listening to me talk. So let me jump in and give you a little bit of context around the program that Summetry put in place. Now, we've heard about the use of some traditional ways of gathering feedback. And what I thought might be interesting for today is actually to end this with a very different example of how input can be incorporated into a business and in a way that we really think is the future. Where we began this process in working with Summetry many years ago, they had a set of not atypical goals, I guess I would say. They wanted to measure performance, they wanted to evolve and enhance the experience and Joe has responsibility for that as well as being an advisor. They wanted to identify those clients that were at risk and increase referrals. And so in order to do that, we used the client insights feature of our absolute engagement engine. That was one single feature. So the client insights feature is a fairly traditional approach to feedback. It's a recurring point in time survey. It is fully customized in terms of the questions that worked for Summetry to meet their objectives. It is analyzed across key segments, including the persona that they have built their experience around, driven down to client level and then providing guidance for leadership and advisors. And they continue to use that process every year or so. But their objectives as a firm were also evolving. And over the course of the last year in particular, they began to think long and hard about what does it really mean to go beyond satisfaction and drive deeper engagement with clients. And in particular, they had set some goals to ensure that the review process was as good as it could be that they were focusing on the right topics, that they were actively engaging both partners in conversations. And of course, as a business, that that process was streamlined right across the firm and inconsistent across advisors. And so to get to that point and meet that objective, different objective required a different process. And so we've implemented the client connect feature, and that's actually where we wanted to focus on our time to make sure that you're getting some different perspectives as we chat today. Now, the context for this and this approach is really the idea, and an idea that I think Summetry understands well, that satisfaction is really about understanding client expectations and preferences. And that's a good thing, obviously. Satisfaction is a good thing. But driving engagement is a little different. To drive deeper engagement, we really believe that you need to create an experience that is not only a reflection of those needs or expectations and preferences, but truly responsive to the concerns and the feelings and the challenges and the very human things that we all experience, both with prospects and with couples. Those things are challenging to access through traditional feedback because feelings, let's face it, are very unique to individuals. They change within couples or they differ within couples. They are different when you're a prospect from where you're a client right across the journey. And most importantly, they're very fluid, right? How we feel today as I'm walking in for my review meeting might be very different from how I felt two months ago. And so the approach then in terms of building feedback in was this client connect process. And the idea here is that we reveal and we respond to client needs as part of the review process. So as Summetry's clients are booking meetings, in this example, I'm using Joe, this is obviously custom to each advisor, but as Joe's clients are booking meetings, they're invited to provide some input at that moment. And they're doing that in order to co-create the agenda for the meeting that is about to come up. And rather than just asking them what else they wanna talk about, which you do ask them, of course, we've gotta be, I think, with human beings, a little more clever around how we tease out what they really need to talk about, not just what the advisor wants to talk about. And so that's what this process is really all about. I'll give you a quick walkthrough of the process itself, and then a little bit of on outcomes, and then I can chat with Joe about that. So here's how the process works. Let's imagine that one of Joe's clients is booking a review meeting with him, doing that through Calendly or some other means. As they do that, and as part of the booking process, they're invited to respond to a very brief set of questions, questions that are not about satisfaction and not about net promoter score. They are about feelings and concerns and needs. At the same time, the spouse is invited to complete that poll as well, as part of the meeting booking process. Now, all of that data is then brought together to tease out some key insights, and two things happen automatically. One is that a client facing agenda is created that Joe can share with a client or prospect if we applied it to that use case in advance of the meeting. So he's getting them thinking, getting them talking and adding value before they come in. The other thing that's happening automatically is that Joe is receiving an internal profile with deeper insights and a custom agenda that marries their standard agenda items with the insights from the poll. And that allows Joe to have the best possible conversation because it is a co-created agenda. All of that data, of course, is aggregated up to the leadership team to tease out insights and so on and so forth. But maybe the most important use case is that it's driving a very different kind of conversation about things that are contextual in that moment. Now, in terms of outcomes, because Summetry does a broad-based survey as well as this, we're able to really compare and contrast. And when we went out to all clients, we were then able to separate those clients who had gone through this ClientConnect process and those who had not. So Summetry's done about, at this point, 300-plus reviews using this process. And I thought it was just really interesting to see the differences just after one or two review meetings and that's literally all it was. You could start to see these very significant differences on everything from the extent to which the advisor focused on what mattered, understood their goals, engaged the partner, which we thought was incredibly important here. And so we've seen some tangible results coming out of that. And Joe, I'll ask you a bit more about the specifics. So just in terms of takeaways, you know, I think that this different kind of process, if you will, is still all about feedback and input. It's just looking at it in a different way. And it's a reminder that we have to get inside the heads of our clients and our prospects. We have to tease out and actually help them frame and articulate what's important to them. But we have to recognize that that changes over time. And because of the very nature of what we're trying to do, the way we capture the feedback has to change as well. And we really think that that's the future. It's about the right questions of the right clients at exactly the right time to trigger the right response. So as I'm talking to Joe, I'm just going to throw up some of the resources that we've made available as well. You can just email us and we'll pull those links together for you and send them along. Our report on beyond satisfaction, couple of articles on personalizing the client experience and access to our blog if you're interested in that. And with that, let me turn to Joe. Joe, you can hear me? You're on screen there? I can hear you. Awesome. So look, first of all, let me say this, Joe, because I think this is an important lead in. I want to talk about the impact, but you are someone that I consider to be incredibly skilled, don't blush when I say this, but incredibly skilled at having deep conversations with your clients. And yet, when you've talked about this process, it's still been an important one to you. So with that as context, I was wondering, can you just sort of talk to us about what you've learned or what the impact has been of this overall process for you? Yeah, I guess a lot of us who have gotten into the business of being advisors, we get into it because we want to help people. And we know to help people, we need to be curious. We need to be curious about their lives and what matters to them and why it matters to them and what they've done to achieve it and what they're willing to do and all that kind of stuff. And so I've been doing this for 25 years and I, yeah, I thought, well, yeah, I'm pretty good at getting clients to share what's important to them. But as we often, all of us, I think advisors are very often reminded, it's not about us. It is about them. And so going through this process of having them answer a series of questions before the meeting gives them an opportunity to reflect on, okay, so how do I feel about this? What is my concern about this? And so I go through that process as a client and then I get to that box that says, what else would you like to talk about? My mind has been triggered as I asked, as I responded to those questions and then something really rich gets put in there that then they say, we want to talk about this. So this co-creation of an agenda happens much more richly if you go through this. Not only that, so if I get that ahead of time, I can prepare better for the conversation that I think we're gonna have in the meeting that might be a week or two away or two days away or whatever it is. But also the client is cogitating on that stuff for the two or three days that they've answered those questions. So the time they get in the meeting and we ask, what else would you like to talk about? All of that unconscious things that they've been thinking about all comes rushing out and you just, you get this, you have a really different kind of conversation. So that timing piece of inviting it before, because I know a lot of advisors say, look, I do this, I'm good. I can do this in the meeting. You find there's some magic to that? I do, I think the magic is just in the fact that if you ask it in the meeting, you have to be comfortable with silence. You have to let the silence go. You know it's gonna take time because people have to process. If they've been processing for days leading up to that meeting, they've got something much deeper and quicker to share. Well, much deeper to share and probably they can share it quicker. So we talked about couples and maybe just building on that point. Can you share any sort of experiences with how this has impacted a couple conversation? Yeah, I think my favorite example there is, so this client that I've worked with for 20 years, the meetings would always be with one of them. And a year ago, I sent out these questions to him and I said, how about you have Val answer this as well? Because I think it's really important even if she can't be there to get her input on what we're gonna be talking about. And of course he's going to agree to that. So he has her answer. Her going through the process of answering those questions made her want to come to the meeting. And then they're both in the meeting. And so as we're going through this, they're both interested in the conversation we're having. They're both engaging in it. They might be engaging at it from different angles, but they're both engaging in it. And you end up finding out what then needs to go back into the, because this all needs to be pragmatic too, right? This all goes back into the planning work, the investment strategy, the whatever it is we're doing on a technical basis with them. But they both find their way to why this is important and valuable for them and interesting. And if people just do more of what they're interested in doing. And so you get them both in. And here's something I just wanna say about that on couples. So advisors at the firm sort of worried about, okay, so we get different answers back from the couple. What do we do? Oh my God, how are we gonna get them to? Our experience has been, even if they answer very differently, what it becomes is a space for the two of them in the meeting to understand better where each other is coming from. And that's a beautiful thing. And so it's not about getting them to have the same answer. It's about helping them each understand why they have the answers they have. And then coming up with ways to help them both get what they as a couple want. So I'm gonna wrap it up because I know there's some comments at the end, but maybe I could just ask you really quickly, what do you think the impact has been on the business? I mean, what the business, I mean, business has three main constituents, right? That it cares about. It cares about the clients. It cares about the team and the employees and it cares about the business. And I think clients, this has helped them have a different kind of experience that's more driven by their input and what they care about. And so they're getting more of what they want. Advisors have a process that allows them to more purposefully prepare for meetings. So it kind of streamlines it and makes their job a little bit easier. And then it also drives the key performance indicators that a business cares about. Retention, loyalty, referrals, which the advisors also care about that. I mean, the advisors care about that. The business cares about that. And clients send those things because they have had a good experience. Nobody sends you a referral just because you're asking for it. They send you one because you've done something special for them and they want somebody they care about to get that something special also. So all three, so the clients are served, the team is served, the business is served. It's a win-win-win. It's marvelous. Thank you, Joe. And I appreciate that. Marie, I'll pass it over to you. Yeah, there are no other questions. We've done a great job on answering them along the way. Julie, if you'll just flip through my last reminder slides, we will continue this conversation about the client experience next month with Ellen Rogan. Then Johnny and I will take another trilogy right after that. You can see it here on the slides. I don't want to waste any time reading for you what you can read for yourself. And then finally in the fall, the last trilogy, Bob Veras and I, you asked for Bob, we got Bob. Bob and I are going to be talking about the art of conversation and influence. So with that, if you'll go to the last slide, Julie, I'm going to leave the viewers and our participants here today with a big thank you. You can get all the resources right here. They're on the slides. We hope that you'll use these slides as a reference and we will see you all in February. Thank you again to all of our panelists. Have a great day. Thank you.

client feedback

improving client experience

measuring client satisfaction

gathering testimonials

homegrown survey

satisfaction survey

Nexa Insights

segmenting clients

Client Connect