The Secrets Behind Commonwealth's Award-Winning Advisor Satisfaction

Fresh off his firm’s 10th consecutive J.D. Power honor for being the top investment firm for independent advisor satisfaction, Commonwealth Financial Network CEO Wayne Bloom pointed to the high level of engagement between advisors and management as the main factor in the firm’s ability to achieve that award yet again.

That’s also what helped Commonwealth achieve a strong year in advisor recruitment in 2022.

In the J.D. Power 2023 U.S. Financial Advisor Satisfaction Study, Commonwealth received an overall satisfaction score of 798 on a 1,000-point scale, outpacing the next-highest-ranked firm by 101 points. Commonwealth achieved the highest score in all reported key drivers of advisor satisfaction: compensation, leadership and culture, professional development, products and marketing, operational support and technology.

“Without the input and suggestions of our advisors, who are at the center of our collective success, a recognition like this would be impossible — we’re incredibly grateful,” Bloom said in a statement. “It’s only through the constant collaboration and communication we enjoy with the advisors who choose to partner with us that we can hold Commonwealth up as the #1 firm for the most satisfied independent advisors.”

Many of the firm’s advisor solutions have been created as the result of feedback on how the firm can improve and add to its suite of services to best help its affiliates drive success, it said.

Notable from the past year were flexible financing options to aid advisor growth and succession planning, enhanced offerings to support advisors with high-net-worth clients, and expanded outsourced business solutions to give advisors access to tools and resources that drive efficiency, according to the company.

During a phone interview with Bloom on Wednesday, he touched on these and other topics, including what keeps him up at night these days.

Bloom concluded, “These collective efforts are rooted in partnership and centered around our ability to continuously evolve alongside our advisors and afford them more time spent with their clients.”

Here is an edited version of our interview.

THINKADVISOR: How was Commonwealth able to achieve 10 consecutive years of J.D. Power recognition? What are your secrets? 

WAYNE BLOOM: I’m really proud of the team internally that worked so hard on the advisors’ behalf.

The feedback mechanism and loops that we have with the advisors and how we engage them not only [help] us do what we do and prioritize things. The manner in which we engage with them and take their feedback and bring them into a lot of our decisions is really what I consider the special sauce.

When the compliance auditors are out in the field doing their annual audit, they’re collecting feedback, qualitative and quantitative. So we understand how we’re doing and what [advisors] like and what they don’t like.

Our practice management team, when they’re doing their annual check, it’s the same thing. What’s going well? They’re educating them on the new things that have come out they may not be aware of. But the crown jewel … the one that’s most mechanized is this online tool that we have and there’s a little plus sign on every page of our website.

And if an advisor or one of their staff clicks it, a dialogue box pops up and there’s all kinds of categorization and then some free-form text that they could write in and they make comments, suggestions, complaints, kudos.

Last year they submitted about 5,000 pieces of feedback. Ninety-two percent of them are responded to within 24 hours. So it’s not always, “yes, we’ll do it,” but it’s, “Hey, great idea, Jeff, that suggestion on CRM is awesome. We’re actually going to have the CRM hood opened in a couple of weeks. We’re going to slide that in to one of the improvements. We’ll get it done.”

Or it might be just, “yeah, Jeff, I understand why you might want that but it’s too expensive and we don’t see the applicability of where other folks would use it, so we’re probably not going to do that one.”

And then there’s just engagement. “Well, tell us a little bit more. What are you trying to do? Oh, You want to do that? Oh, you weren’t aware we have a whole other system that does that.”

And by the way, if they don’t hear back within 24 hours, every morning at eight o’clock on the nose, about 200 of us could get an email. And it’s all the feedback that was submitted yesterday, who submitted it, what they said, who claimed it, what they said. And if it’s not responded to, it’s at the bottom in red.

And then, you know, there’s a lot of peer pressure: ‘Why wasn’t mine responded to?’ And there’s usually a good reason and it gets closed up by the end of the day. But you don’t want to be in red.

We’ve all sent emails to companies, we’ve all left voicemails, and we feel like it goes to a black hole. There is no black hole at Commonwealth. You may not get a yes. You always get a response. You always are heard. You feel heard.

It’s usually just a tagline. At Commonwealth, ‘it’s a firm for advisors by advisors’ [is] not a tagline. We live and breathe it every day.

So when you ask what is the single biggest contributor [to the J.D. Power honors], I think that’s it. It’s the level of engagement. [The advisors] really feel part of what’s going on here and, and they get to direct it or help direct it.

Apologies for the long answer to your question.

[Also a factor is] the technology [and] our partnership with [tech firm] Advisor360°. They were born out of Commonwealth, so [it’s] a tech company that was born out of a broker-dealer/investment advisor, rather than coming the other way, just software. They understand they were advisor-facing people before they were technology people.

So I think that has helped, and we continue to add to the firm. We have over a thousand employees for 2000 or so advisors, and we don’t self-clear. So we’re either woefully inefficient or doing something really special. And I would argue that the advisor votes’ sentiment and feedback says it’s the latter.

So we’ve invested a lot. And whether it’s marketing in the brand studio, the things we’re doing in the high-net-worth space, it’s our entrepreneurial capital program where we invest in our advisors’ practices and help. Then with succession and financing the next generation. So it’s not one thing. It’s a mindset of continuous improvement added into that engagement part.

What drove Commonwealth’s 2022 recruiting success, with 270 financial advisors joining with $11.24 billion? The firm now has about 2,100 advisors managing $243 billion in assets, right?