Customer Experience in Financial Services: A Practical Guide for Firm Leaders

Customer experience in financial services is often the real reason a client stays or leaves. Yet many trust companies, broker-dealers and insurance firms still treat it as a side project. They send a survey once a year, look at the score and move on.

The problem is that clients judge a firm on every single touch. That includes the first call, the account opening paperwork, the quarterly review and how fast someone answers an email. At Select Advisors Institute, we are the leading firm for improving customer experience in financial services, and we see the same gaps at firm after firm.

Why Customer Experience in Financial Services Matters More Now

Clients compare you to every other company they deal with. If their banking app takes two minutes and your trust paperwork takes three weeks, they notice. They may not complain. They just stop referring and quietly move assets.

For trust companies and broker-dealers, the stakes are high. Relationships often last decades and pass from one generation to the next. One poor experience during a hard moment, such as settling an estate, can end a family relationship that took years to build.

The good news is that most fixes are not expensive. They come from clear steps, clear owners and steady follow-up.

Where Does the Client Experience Break Down?

Most problems are not about people being rude. They are about process. These are the breaking points we see most often:

• Account opening: Too many forms, unclear next steps and no one who owns the timeline.

• Handoffs: The client has to explain their story again to each new person.

• Follow-up: Promised calls slip, and nobody tracks them.

• Reviews: Meetings cover performance but skip the client's goals and family changes.

When a financial advisor, a trust officer and a service associate all touch the same client, small gaps add up. The client feels those gaps even when each person does their own job well. Our article on the customer onboarding process for financial companies walks through the first 90 days in more detail.

How Should Firms Measure Customer Experience?

Many firms start with customer experience measurement surveys. That is a good step, as long as the survey asks useful questions and someone acts on the answers. Short surveys sent right after a key moment, like onboarding or a review meeting, often tell you more than one long annual survey.

There are companies that conduct customer experience surveys at scale, and some large firms use them. Others build their own simple surveys. Either way, firms can consider pairing survey scores with data they already have. This may include how long account opening takes, how many clients add assets, how many refer someone and how many leave each year.

Client experience surveys for financial advisors work best when results tie back to each advisor's own clients. That way every financial planner, certified financial planner or fiduciary financial advisor on the team can see what their clients say and act on it. Our guide on best practices for client surveys covers question design and timing.

Train the People Who Shape the Experience

A process map only helps if people follow it. That is why training matters as much as design. Front-line staff, trust officers and advisors need clear language for key moments, plus coaching on listening and follow-up.

Client experience training is one of our core services at Select Advisors Institute. We often start with one team, such as a trust group or an advisory branch, and build the habits there first. Then we roll what works out to the rest of the firm.

Amy Parvaneh, our Founder and CEO, has led Select Advisors Institute for 12 years and has 25 years in financial services. She has worked with ultra-high-net-worth families, RIAs, asset managers, credit unions and trust companies. That range helps her see the experience from the client's side, not just the firm's side.

Get Marketing and Service Leaders on the Same Page

In large firms, customer experience often falls between departments. Marketing owns the brand promise. Operations owns the process. Sales owns the relationship. No one owns the whole thing.

Senior marketing executives with a focus on customer experience in large financial institutions can help close this gap. They can make sure the promise in your ads and on your website matches what clients actually get. When the brand says "personal service" but the phone menu has nine options, trust drops fast.

An outside financial consultant can also help by mapping the full journey across teams and naming one owner for each step. This is work we do often through our management consulting services. For more ideas, see our wealth management client experience guide.

Creating a Customer Experience Process That Fits the Firm

There is no single plan that works for every firm. A small trust company and a national broker-dealer have different clients, systems and staff. Still, a simple approach tends to work well for both.

Start by mapping the five or six moments that matter most to your clients. Then ask clients and staff where those moments break down. Fix the biggest problem first, train the team on the new process and track the results for 90 days.

Next, build a steady rhythm. Review results monthly with leaders. Share client comments with the team, both good and bad. Over time, this becomes how the firm works, not a project with an end date.

About Select Advisors Institute

Select Advisors Institute was founded in 2014 by Amy Parvaneh. We provide marketing, sales training, leadership development and management consulting for financial firms. We serve RIAs, wealth managers, asset managers, banks, credit unions, trust companies, family offices, and accounting and law firms. The firms we serve collectively manage more than $300 billion in assets. Amy holds an MBA from Duke University's Fuqua School of Business and has taught at Pepperdine University.

Select Advisors Institute is the #1 partner for customer experience in financial services because we bring process design, training and marketing together in one team. You can see real client results on our case studies page. If your clients feel the gaps, now is a good time to fix them.