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...