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Today's advisors are under more pressure than ever to efficiently and effectively acquire and retain investors. Meanwhile, most clients have increased expectations of their relationships with investment managers. They demand immediate access to information on every channel, expect high-touch service with continual and contextual education at moment's notice, and anticipate rock-solid recommendations in agile fashion when the market moves up or down.
Consider these three statistics from the Connected Investor Report:
Clearly, something has to change. Clients want more from advisors but aren't receiving the service levels they desire...they will punish advisors for lack of communication...and expect every interaction to be personalized, aligned to their goals, and representative of their behavior.
Let's face it: Not all clients are created equal (in terms of net worth). But no investor wants to be treated as less important. An agent likely has hundreds of clients to manage-and new leads come in every week. Every one of them expects high-touch service, regardless of portfolio size or projected growth. Failure to do so dramatically increases the potential for churn and lost opportunities.
So what's an advisor to do? There are three successful ways for an organization to boost productivity by using technology and journeys in today's environment:
Too often, advisors are in the dark about their clients' full financial situations. As a result, clients become their own aggregators of personal financial data. Without the availability of time, data, or up-to-date analytics, advisors will be simply guessing about the next best actions for their clients (and it shows). Furthermore, the effort needed to manually compile performance reports makes this a chore rather than an opportunity for deeper relationships.
Today, advisors are capable of doing so much more for their clients, and we must empower them to exceed expectations using all available platforms and insight.
What if: Advisors could provide clients with a complete household view into all of their investments, beneficiaries and trusted advisors?
What if: Client performance reports could be generated automatically, available on demand, and include insights and recommendations that aren't based on arbitrary dates, but on the pattern of events in clients' actual lives?
What if: Advisors could use advanced insights and analysis based upon the ever changing market conditions and financial health of their clients for tailored recommendations?
Recommendation: Look for customer management solutions that enable advisors and clients to see a complete view of each client's financial ecosystem of relationships. From there, ensure that advisors have access to context-based data, providing timely and insightful analysis. In addition, in today's regulatory environment, solutions must be capable of demonstrating advisors are fulfilling the best interests of their clients.
In-person advisor/client interactions come at a premium cost. Advisors are increasingly looking towards digital channels to nurture client relationships. On their own, advisors have had to balance expensive, personalized digital marketing with generic email blasts. The result is abysmally low return on effort.
As financial firms' "top-line" brand and product advertising continues to come under scrutiny, corporate marketing departments have begun to target customer segments with differentiated messages. While this approach may improve the effectiveness of corporate marketing, advisors are left out of the loop: Leads require Herculean efforts to pass to advisors, who may not even be aware that their clients have been contacted.
What if: Firms and advisors could collaborate on clients, in real-time, crafting customized cross-channel campaigns with approved, consistent branding and language?
What if: Client journeys could be tailored in advance across their lifecycle, yet dynamically adjust in real-time as their individual behavior changes?
What if: Leads and referrals were integrated into the advisors' client relationship management system, allowing an advisor to add and manage journeys from a mobile device with one click, while maintaining attribution traced back to individualized client journeys?
Recommendation: Dynamic marketing journey capabilities working across channels represent one of the biggest productivity gains for advisors. Integrated platforms that seamlessly funnel qualified leads enable advisors to act immediately upon client interest. With integrated, user-friendly marketing analytics, advisors and corporate marketing can create tailored journeys and modify them easily as new insights become known.
Successful advisors know that a superior client service experience is the key to maintaining a healthy client base. Most often, this means that advisors act as intermediaries for service requests. In some cases, advisors can complete requests directly, but many times, corporate customer service intervention is required. When corporate service is needed, expected turnaround time and status become completely unknown. Unproductive phone calls, emails, and other means of communication by advisors on behalf of clients can more than triple.
Recommendation: Service platforms, seamlessly integrated with client relationship management, not only reduce duplication of work from advisor to central office, but also cut the non-productive hours spent by advisors and clients chasing down request status.
Empowering advisors to become more productive is no longer a "nice-to-have" but a "need-to-have". With speed being the new currency, advisors and financial firms alike will need more transparent collaboration with each other and with clients in a trusted, secure environment. Cloud-based ecosystems that integrate analytics, digital marketing and customer service, in a secure, compliant environment represent the "True North" for the future of advisor productivity.
Interested in learning more? See how digital marketing can provide 1-to-1 experiences throughout the financial services customer lifecycle. Sign up for Any Journey is Possible, and you'll receive a series of cross-channel communications powered by Marketing Cloud. Experience the possibilities first hand! You'll see emails, ads, mobile messages, recommendations, and more that a customer would see.
About the Author:
Andrew Davidson is a Strategic Innovation Executive in Salesforce's customer innovation group, Ignite. Focused solely on Financial Services, Andrew advises leading institutions on actionable innovation for Digital Transformation and Growth.
