Loyalty is a personality trait humans share with most other living creatures. It is a feeling of allegiance and support, and comes with family relationships and friendship.

It also plays a huge role in commerce, including the financial advisory industry.

People have a natural sense of loyalty, and some people are naturally more loyal than others. Financial advisors and providers thrive on creating a sense of loyalty with their clients, and often the most loyal clients become the best referral sources for mor clients.

Spectrem’s new study, Advisor Relationships and Loyalty: What Makes A Client Loyal?*, starts at the beginning by asking investors how loyal they are in general, and then gets into specific information about their loyalty level toward specific service personnel in their lives. Once that is determined, the study delves into the advisor qualities which cultivate loyalty.

So, let’s start at the beginning.

·       Asked to rate their personal degree of loyalty on a 100-point scale, investors in general rated themselves at 83.85, a very high level of loyalty. Investors from the Baby Boomer and World War II generations rated themselves even higher, at above 84 in both cases.

·       However, when asked to rate their loyalty level to commercial enterprises which most investors encounter, the loyalty level dips well below 70 in most cases. For example, loyalty to a particular grocery store is 67.28, and loyalty to a brand of automobile is 67.56.

·       When asked to rate their loyalty to the numerous professionals who handle their financial affairs (such as accountants, bankers or financial advisors), the average response was 78.70. That is higher than the commercial brands mentioned above but below the general sense of loyalty investors express.

Some financial professional types registered loyalty at levels above 80, including accountants (82.75), independent investment advisors (82.95) and full-service brokers (81.12). In contrast, the loyalty investors in general feel toward a robo-advisor is low, at 62.63.

 

 

*This research is part of your Spectrem subscription.

 

 

©Spectrem 2020

 

Keywords: loyalty, investors, advisors, Spectrem, accountants, full service brokers, planners