CRMs need to enable advisors to maintain a holistic view of their clients – technology can also push for actionable intelligent insight and workflow efficiency.
Creating a great experience is key in a world where customers hold high expectations. This is no different within the wealth management world and so the role of the CRM, the customer relationship management solution, has taken on more importance. Happily, technology now allows for a more sophisticated offering that should be more than capable of supplementing the human relationship. The aim is to create a management tool that is personalized, relevant, seamless and easy to use.
Alan Donnelly, Head of Financial Services, Salesforce UK comments: “80% of our customers say that the experience a company provides is as important as its products or services. The technology driving these expectations, such as intelligent data analytics and AI-powered tools, have revolutionized how advisers understand and engage with their clients. Financial services firms using these types of technologies are discovering how to unlock 360-degree views of each and every one of their clients, and it has become a massive competitive advantage.”
This is a far cry from the CRM tools of yesteryear, which were more akin to a digital rolodex. The basic job was to allow wealth managers to keep track of their current clients and prospects and the best way to reach them, according to David Mehlhorn, Director of Sales at Redtail Technology.
Happily, things have changed, and the purpose and functions of today’s CRM systems have expanded massively. Mehlhorn explains: “As the industry has morphed from transactional in nature to one built upon relationships, technologies had to emerge to support and strengthen these deepening relationships. CRMs now must provide a way for advisors to maintain a holistic view of their clients, including their financial information, sure, but also encompassing everything else the advisor knows about the client.
Indeed, function wise CRMs are now integrated solutions that build upon and improve what wealth managers are already doing - providing a great level of service. But the approach needs to be integrated and customized. Functions include client acquisition, onboarding, regulatory compliance, relationship management, client servicing, plus client and advisor engagement. By drawing in data from all these touch points the advisor gets a 360- degree view of the client and is able to better service them.
Laura Dalziel, Global Head of Marketing at Wealth Dynamix explains: “An innovative CRM solution should empower the wealth managers with the tools and information they need to service their clients, whilst also engaging clients with the right information at the right time. Effective client management can streamline time-consuming processes and reduce the administrative burden through automation and digitization.”
An automated workflow and integration tools are also a key component of any modern CRM. “CRMs need strong automated workflow capabilities and a pipeline management tool, as well as methods for client segmentation that assist with targeted marketing outreach. Industry CRMs should also offer substantive integration with other major tools in Fintech to reduce bottlenecks as advisors transition between different functions in their day-to-day activities,” says Redhorn.
And Ben Revill, Financial Services Business Manager at Xpedition emphasizes the need for integration from front to back. “You might have a firm that can easily link up its various onboarding processes but cannot communicate effectively with its middle and back office – in which case the challenge is to bolster that function,” he says.
Client benefits
For the client meanwhile, the means to have a cohesive and holistic experience is important. Interactions need to be higher quality and advice from their wealth managers should ultimately lead to more informed investment decisions and overall greater satisfaction of service.
With technological advances, the CRM can also be leveraged further to provide intelligent, actionable insight so that the client relationship is not just managed it is also progressed. Indeed, CRM systems are evolving into tools that constantly become smarter, making users consistently more productive and serving their customers happier.
Dalziel comments: “The use of AI and data analytics is changing how all industries manage client data, not just wealth. It enables both advisors and clients to have access to actionable, intelligent insight, provide best suggestions to clients and tailor conversations for clients and prospects, increasing client retention and prospect conversion rates. It is also helping firms to drive down the cost of giving advice to clients by automating repetitive tasks and appropriately routing and managing workloads, taking the burden away from staff.”
Revill says that intelligent technology and AI can also make for significant savings when it comes to dealing with compliance and regulations. “Compliance is overwhelming cost-wise, especially for smaller players, but a decent AI-enabled CRM capability means it is possible to engineer a firm out of a compliance cost nightmare.”
Maximizing the technology
But how is this playing out with wealth managers? Mehlhorn thinks that advisors need to make sure they are using their CRM to its full capabilities. “This is before you even factor in mobile technology, data analytics, AI, etc. We often find that advisors aren’t taking advantage of the efficiencies they could be realizing were they to fully exploit the capabilities of their CRM. Going forward, with the rollout of big data analytics and AI functionalities, advisors need to stay as up-to-date as possible, looking for ways they can use these tools to improve their operations and strengthen the client experience they offer.”
And Gary Rusby, Director at IMVS meanwhile thinks that the capability of the CRM is evolving along with technology. “The need is to ask what the client actually wants and offer as opposed to what is technologically possible but perhaps unlikely to be used much in practice.”
He cites mobile interactivity as something very attractive to younger clients but unlikely to have much uptake with older generations. “CRM should ultimately be a rich seam within the overall relationship and help to manage both the relationship and the business,” he says.
And Donnelly adds: “We're beginning to see more wealth managers accept that they need new technologies which allow them to connect with this new generation of investors and that CRM systems offer the best way to help them achieve this. Above all else, technology allows wealth managers to provide the relevant information to their clients wherever they are, whatever the demands and ensure they fit into that clients’ personal journey needs.”
To view a range of other CRM systems relevant to the wealth management sector, visit our Client Engagement & Management business need category here: https://www.thewealthmosaic.com/needs/client-engagement-management/
