Strengthen the Advisor-Customer Relationship with Meaningful Non-Financial Touches

Does your CRM prompt advisors with reasons for non-financial touches?

I’ve spoken in the past about integrated desktops and the value they bring to advisors and the firm. In essence, the integrated desktop brings together all the information and applications an advisor uses into a single workspace. This increases the advisor’s productivity by eliminating redundant data entry, as well as the need to toggle through multiple applications, searching for and collating information to service the customer. It also makes it easy to deliver personalized, proactive service, as everything an advisor needs to know about the client – his family members’ names, his hobbies, his investment preferences, and more – are all together in a single, unified space. As you can imagine, this increases advisor satisfaction, and helps promote the retention of your top producers.

In our experience, a key building block of a strong advisor/client relationship is the ability I spoke of above to know a client – to effortlessly make conversation or provide recommendations in line with their interests. As part of our Customer Loyalty Program feature, we automatically schedule and prompt for non-financial touches (such as sending a relevant news article), at a frequency commensurate with the client’s value to the customer (his or her tier).

Now, we know that non-financial touches can be hard. Advisors need to reach out via email, social media, telephone, or an invitation to event, without a pressing business purpose. They don’t want to waste their clients’ time, they don’t want to frustrate them with generic small talk, and they certainly don’t want to damage the relationship by sharing information the client isn’t remotely interested in, thus proving they don’t know the client well enough.

Overcoming this obstacle, so that advisors can reach out with confidence and share information that shows they know their clients and care about improving their lives, is a priority of NexJ’s. We partner with industry leaders so that firms can equip their advisors the best and most complete integrated desktop. This includes embedding up-to-date market news and data, social media post suggestions, and non-financial prompts on the client’s record and, where appropriate, in the advisor’s To Do list. We’ve been providing this capability for years and continue to supplement it with quality news sources. For example, we recently partnered with MT Newswires, a recognized leader in original and unbiased business and financial news, to ensure advisors are always equipped with the best options for touches.

Does your CRM prompt advisors with reasons for non-financial touches? If not, it might be time to consider adding the capability. When your advisors have the information they need at their fingertips to better understand and service customers, everyone wins – the advisor, the customer, and the firm.