Advisor experience has been a buzzword for over a decade now. From a technology perspective, what falls under the advisor experience umbrella can be hardware like the computer, mouse, and keyboard you provide an advisor. But it also includes the software, systems, and tools an advisor uses in their day-to-day.
The latest Fintech Map from Michael Kitces shows hundreds of solutions vying to be part of your firm’s advisor (and client) experience.
If your firm isn’t intentional about creating the right experience for advisors (just like you are for clients with CX), you are missing growth opportunities that will start adding up quickly.
But it isn’t just a concern for managers and executives. Uninspiring (or even downright bad) tech is one of the top five reasons advisors change firms.
So how can you build an advisor experience that makes your advisors better, happier, and more efficient?.
Deliver a 360-Degree View of Clients and Prospects
Account aggregation has become a staple and not the “nice to have” it was once considered, with countless firms touting their ability to show clients all of their accounts in one place. But clients aren’t the only ones who need a comprehensive view of their financial picture.
Advisors do, too (and they need two!).
The top firms give their advisors two dashboards to work with:
- An overview of all their clients and prospects in the pipeline, and
- A detailed view of each client’s or prospect’s financial information
The first dashboard type gives your advisor an overview of their entire book of business and their sales pipeline, allowing them to make informed decisions on where they should focus their attention next. As a result, your firm can grow while remaining healthy with the knowledge that efforts are being put toward growing in the right direction and with the right type of clients.
The second type of dashboard is intended to free your advisors to give the best advice, which they can only do if they have all the information. By leveraging data aggregation and consolidation, this dashboard opens opportunities to gain wallet share and improve the business growth of your entire organization.
Enable Smart Growth with Business Intelligence Tools
Catering to every single client is difficult—and becomes seemingly impossible when you reach a certain ratio of clients to an advisor. Truly custom service and advice for everyone requires great people skills and an even better memory.
Unfortunately, our memories will fail us at some point. Too many clients with too many decision points and action items mean something will get lost in the shuffle—unless you have the right tech keeping track of everything for your advisory team and their support staff.
Business Intelligence tools give you the insights necessary to know who needs attention and when they need it, so nothing gets lost.
The tech you choose can either limit your advisors’ ability to engage with customized outreach or give you the augmented abilities of a bigger team so you can give one advisor the scale to accomplish the outreach of ten advisors.
Streamline Onboarding to Reduce Manual Entry and NIGOs
No matter which custodian you’ve chosen, client onboarding always features a lot of the same tasks: establishing a risk profile, selecting an investment portfolio, signing documents, sharing important forms…so much of which can be automated!
The ideal client onboarding process is a hybrid of manual and automated tasks, with advisors only needing to step in to fill the gaps where automation cannot be used.
In addition, you can set up automations to capture all necessary information, basically eliminating the risk of errant keystrokes that result in NIGOs and duplicate data. And when something isn’t filled in correctly, having onboarding technology at your side can catch those issues before your forms are submitted for review—resulting in fewer NIGOs, a more productive internal staff, and likely better relations (and less frustration) with your chosen custodian.
With the right workflows in place, your team will experience faster transitions, cleaner data, and fewer headaches.