Financial Advisor Marketing & Technology

Do your clients know all the work you do for them? Do you sometimes wait weeks or even months for clients to send you documents, fill out forms, or provide you with answers to important questions? When a client asks you to work with his lawyer or accountant, do things fall through the cracks?

These common problems create inefficiency and can make your advisory firm look bad to clients. So Advisor Products attacked the problems and we have solved it!

To-Do Manager, a feature in the Advisor Products Personal Client Portal platform, bridges the gap between advisors and clients. Utilizing the power of the Web, To-Do Manager creates more meaningful communication between your firm and your clients to help you both get things done efficiently.

Now, To-Do Manager has been integrated with XLR8, a leading web-based CRM system, to create straight-through processing of client to-dos from your CRM system to your clients.

Whenever your firm has a task a client must handle, you can assign it to the client in the XLR8 CRM system and it is displayed as a to-do in your client’s personal financial portal. You and your client can track the to-do and comment on it until you mark it “achieved.”

For example, if you need a client to send you his will by the end of the month, you can assign that as a to-do for the client in XLR8. When you check off a box designating the task as a client to-do along with the due date, XLR8 programmatically exports the task description to the client’s personal portal. If a client has a question or comment about the to-do, the client’s response is tracked in the client’s portal and also deposited in XLR8 for your records. The entire conversation about each to-do is recorded in both the client’s portal and XLR8 because of this two-way XML integration, and each of you are notified when there’s a communication about the task.(See a one-minute video.)

Asset management fees have been slashed by the bear market while firms still have the same number of clients, making efficiency improvements mandatory. Meanwhile, the Madoff scandal and a slew of other Ponzi has required firms to be far more transparent in the way they serve clients. The To-Do Manager/XLR8 integration accomplishes both of these key goals.

Fewer items will fall through the cracks. Moreover, you are providing a way for clients to achieve near- term tasks that must be handled if they are going to accomplish long-term financial goals. And, by tracking and displaying all of the achieved To-Dos, you help each client through each task, showing them a running list of valuable service items you’re providing.

The interface of the Advisor Products Client Portal system with this XLR8 represents a breakthrough in client communications because it transforms a CRM system in to a client communication tool. While CRM systems have long been used by advisory firms to manage and track their contacts and, to a lesser extent, to track workflows and tasks assigned to staff, this integration transforms the XLR8 CRM system into a tool for managing and tracking tasks assigned to clients.

XLR8 is a customized version of Salesforce, the world’s largest CRM system, which was created by Moulton Strategic Partners (MSP) specifically for advisory firms. MSP is a consulting firm that implements many of the most popular CRM systems used by advisors. It works with many of the largest, most successful RIA firms in the nation.

Salesforce, a web-based system, is best known for its open architecture and flexible configuration tools. Just today the firm announced it was positioned in the leaders quadrant of Gartner's CRM Customer Service Contact Centers Magic Quadrant.

With XLR8, MSP leverages the power of Salesforce to provide most of the functionality advisory firms commonly need in a CRM. MSP consultants further customize the system by documenting an advisory firm’s processes into the system and then embedding those processes into XLR8.

The Advisor Products Personal Client Portals platform is the first web based, open-architecture system dedicated solely to enhancing client communications. The client portal platform provides interfaces with almost all of the leading portfolio management software systems. Integration with other CRM systems and financial planning applications are in development.

The client portal allows your advisory firm to assign other professionals To-Dos for easy collaboration with estate planning attorneys and tax accountants, and you can also enable clients to assign you to-dos. More integrations are on the way and Advisors Products will continue to improve communications between advisors and their clients.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 16th, 2009 at 1:37 pm and is filed under Financial Advisor Technology, Practice Management. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.