Deciphering Vendor Speak, Part 3: ‘Increase Productivity’

Vendors Say The Darndest Things

Who doesn’t want their team to work faster? And not just faster, but better as well? It’s what we all want. That’s why ‘increasing productivity’ is a key driver behind many front-office system upgrades. It’s also the reason so many vendors promise productivity improvements. So how do you sort out the empty promises from the legitimate? The simple answer is: do your research. Ask the questions, demand the proof.

So having said that, let me give you some insight into how NexJ drives productivity for advisors and bankers. (Read more here about how we saved one client’s advisors two hours per week.)

First, we deliver a single source of information and functionality in an integrated desktop, so no more toggling through multiple systems to get work done. This is a huge time saver. Just ask any of our customers, whose advisors previously had to access many systems to get to the information and functionality they needed each day. The integrated desktop is designed to reduce clicks and enable users to complete tasks faster. For example, it includes features like:

• A single intuitive view of customer information including profile data, relationships, accounts, interactions, and insights
• Actionable notifications that let users navigate directly to the entity involved and perform any required activities
• Relationship modelling that rolls account, interaction, and product data up along defined relationships and allows quick drill down
• Schedule Synchronization, which synchs tasks and schedule items on Outlook and Gmail to ensure users are always up-to-date whether they’re checking their phone, tablet, or computer.

Next, we reduce the amount of admin work users have to do so they can focus on sales and service since, as we’ve discussed previously, advisors spend nearly 40% of their day on administrative work. Back-office systems and CRM are automatically updated with new information collected during KYC reviews, for example, thus eliminating data entry. Call list management distributes a copy of call reports as they’re logged to all members of the client coverage team, so users aren’t spending their time searching for or sharing reports.

We use artificial intelligence to enable users to work smarter – to spend less time making more money. This includes AI features like Customer Loyalty Management that leverages the customer tier, service model, and other attributes to notify users when it’s time to reach out to a customer. We even suggest reasons to call for nonfinancial proactive touches. Along the same vein, NexJ Inform acts like a personal research assistant, continually searching more than 10,000 publicly-available and internal research documents, matching articles with user and customer profiles, and sharing them in the channel of choice, whether that be CRM, social media, newsletter, or email.

These are just some of the ways NexJ helps firms improve their users’ productivity. Hopefully it gives you some ideas to keep in mind when looking to drive productivity in your front office. If there are any other vendor terms you’d like me to define from a NexJ perspective, leave a comment below or send me an email. I’d love to hear from you.