If you ask financial advisers what really drives their business, most won’t say revenue, compliance, or even performance. They’ll say relationships.
Strong client relationships sustain advice businesses through market volatility, regulatory change, and fee pressure. They underpin referrals, retention, and trust. Yet, despite how central relationships are to advice, many firms struggle to measure the quality of the relationships between their staff and clients in any meaningful way.
That’s where metrics such as Net Promoter Score (NPS) can play a valuable role. The Net Promoter Score is a practical “relationship pulse check” that you can use to look at your firms’ performance.
Why measure relationships at all?
Delivering financial advice is a high-trust, high-credence service. Clients often can’t easily evaluate the technical quality of advice, but they are very aware of how they feel about the relationship. Do they feel heard? Understood? Supported?
In my work with service organisations, one consistent pattern emerges: firms that rely solely on gut instinct to judge client sentiment are often surprised when clients disengage, complain, or quietly leave. By the time a client files a complaint or moves their assets, the relationship has usually been deteriorating for some time.
Simple metrics, used well, help surface those early warning signs.
What NPS does well
NPS asks a deceptively simple question: “How likely are you to recommend us to a friend or colleague?” The logic is intuitive. If a client is willing to recommend you, the relationship is probably healthy.
Academic research paints a nuanced picture. NPS is not always superior to other measures like satisfaction or trust, and it should never be treated as “the one number measure that you need to grow”. However, studies consistently show that at an overall firm or brand level, NPS can give you good insights into whether your firm is growing or declining.
For financial advisers, the key is how NPS is used.
Used transaction-by-transaction (“How did you feel about this meeting?”), NPS can be noisy and misleading. Used periodically as an overall relationship indicator “Thinking about your relationship with our firm…” it becomes much more informative.
Trust is the real story behind the score
One reason NPS resonates in financial services is that it appears to act as a proxy for trust. Research in financial institutions shows that clients with high trust in their provider are dramatically more likely to be promoters, while low-trust clients cluster among detractors.
For advice businesses, that matters. Trust is not built solely on returns. Clients judge trustworthiness through clarity of communication, perceived competence, ethical behaviour, and reliability over time. NPS doesn’t tell you why trust is high or low, but it flags moments in time where more work is needed to understand what’s working well (and what is not) for your client base.
This is why the most effective firms pair NPS with a simple open-ended follow-up: “What’s the main reason for your score?” Those comments are where the gold lies.
Practical ways advisers can use NPS
When advisers tell me they’ve tried NPS before and “it didn’t work”, the issue is rarely the metric itself. It’s how it was implemented.
Here are a few tips:
1. Use NPS
Once or twice a year is usually enough. The goal is trend tracking, not perfection. You’re looking for patterns over time, not a single magic number.
2. Focus on movement, not benchmarks
Comparing your firm’s NPS to other industries and firms is not helpful. What matters is whether your score, and the underlying comments, are improving, declining, or splitting into promoters and detractors.
3. Close the loop with clients
If a client gives a low score, that’s not a failure, it's an invitation to ask more questions. Advisers who follow up (thoughtfully and without defensiveness) often strengthen relationships precisely because clients feel heard.
4. Use NPS internally, not just externally
Some advice firms now track NPS-style feedback across adviser teams or offices, using it as a learning tool rather than a performance weapon. This supports service consistency and professional development.
NPS isn’t enough — but it’s a good start
It’s important to be clear: NPS should not replace richer measures of client experience. Advice businesses should also be paying attention to trust, confidence, understanding, and perceived value.
But NPS has one major advantage. It is a simple measure. It’s easy for clients to answer, easy for firms to track, and easy to explain internally. In a heavily regulated environment where advisers are already stretched, that matters.
Seen through this lens, NPS is not about chasing promoters or fearing detractors. It’s about systematically listening to clients and using that feedback to strengthen advice relationships over time.
In an industry built on trust, that’s not just good measurement practice, it’s the basis for delivering great advice.
Professor Sharyn Rundle-Thiele,
Department of Tourism and Marketing, Griffith University
