As you will have seen, we recently sent out a client survey to gain an insight into your thoughts and feelings about our service. As promised, we’re sharing the survey results with you and what changes we’ll make where necessary.

Of those who completed the survey, we’re delighted to say that:

• 100% of clients would recommend us to their friends and family.
• 54.05% of clients have recommended us in the last 12 months alone.
• 100% of clients believe that working with us has helped or will help to achieve their financial goals.
• A combined 90% of clients said they felt either considerably or somewhat reassured as a result of our communications during the pandemic.

We’re ecstatic that 100% of our clients would feel comfortable recommending us to their friends and family. We believe this shows the service we give to our clients is reliable and worthy of recommending.

Also, we’d like to thank those of you who have recommended us, especially those that have done so in the last 12 months. Recommendations are extremely useful to the growth of our business.

Our performance

We were interested to see how satisfied our clients were with our performance, rating us on a scale of 1 – 10 (1 being “not at all satisfied”, and 10 being “extremely satisfied”). We’re ecstatic to say that, overall, our clients have scored our services with 9.73 out of 10. Here’s a breakdown of this result:

• A combined 93.44% of clients selected 9 or 10 out of 10 when asked how satisfied they are with the speed of our responses.
• 93.34% of clients of clients voted 9 or 10 out of 10 when asked how satisfied they are with how we understand their needs, goals and objectives.
• When asked about the level of satisfaction clients have regarding our communication and support between meetings, 83.6% answered 9 or 10 out of 10.

We’re delighted to see that the majority of our clients were satisfied with our performance across the board. However, we’d love to get this to 100%. So, if there is anything that we can do better, please let us know, and we’ll do our best to be even better for you.

Difference between client groups

With this survey, we wanted to discover what the financial concerns of our different client groups are, both those who have not yet retired and those who have. We wanted to see if there were financial concerns these groups had in common or if they had their own individual financial concerns.

The three biggest concerns for those who have not yet retired are:

• Not having enough money to live their preferred lifestyle in retirement
• Level of investment returns
• Their family’s financial security should anything happen to them was joint third with giving wealth to younger generations.

Meanwhile, the three biggest concerns for those who have already retired are:

• The cost of care in old age
• Level of investment returns
• Giving wealth to younger generations without affecting their lifestyle.

While we were unsurprised, it’s still interesting to see that both those before and after retirement have concerns about passing wealth to younger generations. This shows the value people place on ensuring their families’ long-term financial security.

We were also intrigued by the focus on investment returns and worries about potential investment losses from both groups. It’s interesting as it’s usually those who are already retired who are concerned about investment returns; this may become a key focus of our annual review meetings.

Please be sure to let us know any of your financial concerns at your next review meeting, so we can discuss your options.

The benefits of working with Berry & Oak

In our survey, we asked clients: “How do you measure the value you receive from Berry & Oak?” by selecting the most valuable option. We’re delighted with some of the responses:

• 47.54% of clients selected knowing they have a “go-to” person for their financial affairs.
• 24.59% of people chose the increased sense of financial security since working with us.
• 11.48% of clients selected the peace of mind we provide.
• A further 11.48% of clients chose the progress towards achieving their financial/life goals was most important.

All our team are thrilled with the comments received from this question. It provides a morale boost to know that the work we do genuinely helps our clients.

We’d like to thank everyone who completed our survey; your feedback has been extremely helpful. Moving forward, we’ll be taking action to improve our service even more as we strive to provide the best service possible.