CRM Can Address Challenges Faced By Advisors In A Post-Pandemic World. Here’s How

Advisors in financial services firms work with more and more data over time.

The tools at their disposal allow them to treat this data in all kinds of ways, but their success depends wholly upon how this leads to actionable and intelligent insights.

Today, advisors who don’t have access to a consolidated view of their customers, are like fighter pilots flying with a faulty engine. They have products and systems working at cross-purposes and juggle between them constantly to try and service customers. The result is often far from pretty and will only become more challenging in a post-pandemic world of more touchpoints and vastly increased volumes of data.

Understanding How Advisors Spend Their Time

Studies show that advisors access CRM more frequently than any other application, making it their most valuable resource. It stands to reason, then, that this should be the core of their workstation. To acknowledge that advisors spend more time on CRM than on financial planning, account aggregation, or research and analytics, is to recognize that the intelligent use of CRM can help firms offer genuine value to customers.

A truly integrated CRM product can deliver on a firm’s real-time data requirements, offer a superior user experience, and drive high user adoption rates. It can also leverage the power of Artificial Intelligence and analytics to help strengthen trusted relationships, and grow assets under management.

The Need To Service Customers Better

NexJ has successfully implemented CRM for 75% of wirehouses including Wells Fargo, UBS, and RBC, making it the core of their advisors’ workstations rather than standalone solutions. Interestingly, studies show that advisors at Wirehouses are twice as likely to say their CRM exceeds expectations, which is possible only when they successfully integrate it.

Customer demands and expectations continue to evolve, and the need for relevant content and helpful interactions is only set to rise in the aftermath of the pandemic when a sense of uncertainty will be higher than ever. This has prompted many firms to re-evaluate their approach to building CRM, pivoting to solutions that allow their advisors to service customers better.

In the years to come, effective experiences will only be possible when firms understand that customers are always connected. The nature of customer journeys will change, along with how firms approach digital transformation, to prevent a loss of market share. The only thing that matters, more than ever, is high engagement with customers. This encourages customers to try new products or services, become ambassadors for firms, and ultimately spend more.

Business Is About Relationships

Anxiety is a fallout of the pandemic that financial services firms will have to contend with, and will have an impact on how advisors interact with customers. As face-to-face interactions are dropped in favour of contactless meetings and remote networking, there will also be a rise in the deployment of collaborative tools and products for departments to function better, all of which will be driven by how firms approach digital transformation.

Advisors will need to address this anxiety from customers, offering them reassurance with the help of actionable advice backed by the intelligent parsing of data. This will have implications for the nature of all relationships between advisors and customers, making the need for empathy more pronounced. Firms can generate this empathy by showing their customers how well they understand them, offering them personalized products and services, and being able to do this in a manner best suited to a customer’s needs, wants, and touchpoints of choice.

An Integrated Advisor Workstation makes this easier by offering a unified view of all customer information. NexJ’s Comprehensive Customer View provides advisors with a 360° view of their contacts, in an easy-to-view and navigable format. It allows advisors to create a single point of truth by consolidating information across company-wide sources, which is then shared across all lines of business. Seamless integration between advisor tools eliminates duplicate data entry while ensuring that context is passed between applications.

NexJ has always believed that business is about relationships, be it our 30,000 users with Wells Fargo in the US or 60 users with Credit Suisse in Mexico. To find out about how we are helping firms across our diverse, geographically dispersed client base gear up for tomorrow, get in touch with us today.