Cindy Runger Balas, an attorney turned financial advisor, was hoping to become a million-dollar producer by 2013, but fate seemed to be conspiring against her. She had a baby and then the Great Recession struck, and it seemed she wouldn't reach her goal.

"I took great pride in helping my clients during the downturn, but it was hard coming in every day and hearing about people losing their jobs," says Runger Balas, a financial advisor at RBC Wealth in Seattle. Her numbers started to suffer. That's when she decided to take action and join the firm's FA Forward program, designed to turn around the production numbers of advisors.

FA Forward and two other programs run by RBC — Jump Start and Top Gun — are part of a practice management strategy that the firm believes helped it snag the top spot on the recent 2011 U.S. Full Service Investor Satisfaction Study conducted by J.D. Power & Associates, a unit of New York-based McGraw-Hill Cos. The survey of more than 4,200 investors is nearly a decade old, but "in its two years of being ranked, RBC has scored really high," says David Lo, J.D. Power's Director of Investment Services and Mortgage Practice Services and Emerging Industries Division.

RBC was rated first in customer satisfaction this year after coming in second last year. In fact, the firm scored 814 out of a possible 1,000, when the average was 772. RBC performed particularly well in an area of the survey called "The Advisor Factor," in which there are seven specific measurements. On a ten-point scale, RBC scored a 9 or higher in five categories and above 8.5 on two others. "As you improve satisfaction, you improve loyalty," Lo says.

RBC beat out bigger and better-known wirehouse rivals, such as Bank of America Merrill Lynch, UBS, Morgan Stanley Smith Barney and Wells Fargo.

"Why are the wirehouses not performing as well?" asks Lo rhetorically. "They are more competitive as you get into higher wealth levels. The expectations of clients, as they accumulate more wealth, gets higher," Lo says. "The number of average contacts is higher for the wealthy." To get to the same level of satisfaction for a very rich client, the average number of contacts jumps to seven or eight instead of two, Lo explains.

Another area where RBC fared better was whether the advisor contacted the client about new products or services four or more times in the past year.

RBC scored well with 63% of respondents compared to 47% for UBS, 46% for Morgan Stanley Smith Barney, 47% for Merrill Lynch and 39% for Wells Fargo. But RBC didn't do quite as well as the wirehouses when it came to returning contact within one business day. While RBC got an admirable 79%, just above the 78% average, UBS grabbed 86% and Wells Fargo 83%.

Even so, RBC is proud of its placement in the survey. Mary Zimmer, who leads Wealth Management Services and serves as head of International Wealth-USA for RBC, says, "our goal has explicitly been to be the best advisory firm and be the client's first choice."

In the wealth management business, "there is a direct immediate and measurable connection between employee engagement and how they treat their clients," says John Taft, chief executive of RBC Wealth Management-U.S. "So it is not surprising to me, but extremely gratifying, that an independent survey validated what I believe: If you can create a culture where the employees are engaged, it will translate into client satisfaction and to me that's been the secret of our success." RBC Wealth Management in the United States has more than 2,100 financial consultants, 200 offices in 42 states and $227 billion in assets under administration. It is a unit of Royal Bank of Canada and, notes Taft, it has "been stable when our competitors have dealt with some historic turbulence and volatility in their business."

Top Gun
One way to achieve superior client satisfaction is to give better service to a smaller number of clients, Christopher "Chris" Detmer says. "The truth is, our practice grew tremendously in the first 20 years of launching it," says Detmer, who runs The Washington Wealth Group of RBC Wealth in the nation's capital. "My business was running me rather than me running my business, and my quality of life deteriorated significantly. So I said I needed some help."

Detmer, 49, along with his partner Aaron Brachman, a 31-year-old financial planner, ran a very profitable practice so they went into the program known as Top Gun for high-end producers at the firm.

Detmer recalls that it was a "forum to unlearn poor, inefficient ways" of operating while acquiring new skills. "We were ready, we were willing and we were hungry for that type of offering," he adds.