Redesigned questionnaire helps American Express Financial Advisors assess effectiveness of client acquisition techniques

Advising the advisors

American Express Financial Advisors (AXP Advisors) provides a wide range of financial products and services to almost two million clients nationwide. The Minneapolis-based firm has spent the past year improving the way it measures how those clients are acquired, seeking to identify the most effective techniques and pass them on to advisors in the field. One way it does that is by sending questionnaires to its advisors to find out which techniques they used to acquire new clients.

The client acquisition technique (CAT) form is sent to 7,800 financial advisors. Each form contains a list of the clients the advisor acquired during the past quarter. It asks the advisor to indicate which technique they used to acquire the client, which corporate office program was used, if any, and whether the client is a small business owner or not.

The initial CAT study earned disappointing response rates. The form closely resembled other reports received by advisors from the corporate office. It was distributed to advisors through their manager (in many cases, a manager's assistant) and the form design simply failed to highlight the importance of the report. In addition, when the forms were returned to the corporate office, the task of entering the data fell to various people. Advisors' confusion in completing the report forms and inconsistent interpretation of the data by key entry professionals often rendered invalid up to 40 to 50 percent of the data for a single area office.

Faced with disappointing response rates and a lack of dedicated resources to support the initial study, AXP Advisors turned to Data Recognition Corporation (DRC), a Minnetonka, Minn., firm specializing in information management and survey processing services. "DRC recommended a creative solution that provided a professional, user-friendly report form design and a highly accurate method to capture the data," says Margaret Beier, analyst with AXP Advisors.

To make the CAT report form easier for advisors to complete, the AXP Advisors Market Information and Controller's department introduced a machine-readable image/OCR (optical character recognition) document for its client acquisition study in 1995. "Based on the need described by AXP Advisors, we felt our integrated data collection approach could provide the needed solution and we are certainly pleased with the outcome," says Wayne Serie, DRC vice president.

Boost response rates

Research has long supported the idea that a form's appearance can significantly affect whether it will be read by a respondent and completed correctly. Larger print, balanced white space, use of color and a simple approach can help respondents more easily complete a form, ultimately boosting response rates. However, making a respondent's job easier doesn't always result in a goodlooking form.

Fortunately, recent advances in data capture software and technology now provide researchers with aesthetically pleasing, computer-readable documents that can also read multiple formats, including handwritten marks and characters and machine written characters such as letters, numbers and bar codes.

The new questionnaire developed by AXP Advisors and DRC is a four-page report form containing a customized cover letter outlining the benefits of the program for advisors. The new report form provides a flexible list of acquisition techniques and corporate sponsored programs with corresponding descriptions that can be revised as programs and techniques change. These descriptions are used to complete the final page that provides a list of clients acquired by the advisor in the previous quarter.

Advisors are asked to indicate the acquisition technique and corporate sponsored program used to acquire the specified client. The entire report form is variable - including the response positions - which provides the flexibility to change any aspect of the form throughout the year. Finally, to increase awareness and to eliminate any delays caused by inter-office distribution, DRC sends the report form directly to advisors via U.S. mail.

Advisors have indicated to management that past attempts to collect this information were outdated, inconsistent and very confusing. "Our previous report forms included information that the corporate office needed in our database, but was confusing to the advisor," says Beier. "DRC used our database to streamline the form and to provide only the information that the advisor needed to complete the form."

A new distribution method, the addition of the description list, the elimination of unnecessary information and a user-friendly form resulted in a 30 percent jump in response rates in some area offices. With the program changes, AXP Advisors finally met and passed their response rate goal of 70 percent, closing last quarter at 77 percent.

Quarterly reports

The client acquisition technique measurement team issues quarterly data reports on the study findings to field leaders and internal program leaders. "We report quarterly the results of the study so that the leadership in the field and corporate office is able to provide advisors adequate training and support," says Beier. If needed, AXP Advisors can also call DRC to receive mid-quarter updates to see how things are going.

DRC returns the results to AXP Advisors as raw data matched back to the firm's database. The report forms are scanned by DRC staff using image/OCR scanning software. The software interprets the advisor's pre-printed identification number and the technique code hand printed by the advisor and converts the characters to an ASCII format. The scanned advisor data is matched to the corresponding advisor number in the AXP Advisors database and merged.

The new image scanning software solution has helped AXP Advisors rectify the data entry and invalid data problems. "Our internal staff have analyzed the data provided by the image scanner and found it to be 98 percent accurate," says Beier.

"Until now we have felt that we did not have a reliable process for collecting and analyzing client acquisition information. It had been a challenge to find the right combination of solutions for each step in the process. We were crawling with the program. DRC's solutions have allowed us to get up and run with the program," says Beier. "The changes in our client acquisition techniques study allow the research department to focus on the immediate objective - to provide high quality data quarterly to its internal partners to be used for future resource planning."