Personal Financial Workspaces for Your Clients or Stop Being Average and Start Being Remarkable

Wednesday, March 28th, 2012

by Bob Simp­son, Syn­chronic­ity Per­for­mance Consulting

There is one unde­ni­able truth about build­ing a great finan­cial advi­sory practice:

The bet­ter you man­age client rela­tion­ships, the more suc­cess­ful your busi­ness will be.

Unfor­tu­nately, you work in an indus­try that teaches you how to be aver­age.  Man­age­ment and com­pli­ance don’t want you to be dif­fer­ent.  Sure, they would like you to pro­duce more rev­enue, as long as you don’t do any­thing different.

The prob­lem with this the­ory is that clients are demand­ing more.  Aver­age isn’t help­ing them to achieve their goals.  Baby boomers have taken over North America’s wealth and they are more demand­ing than pre­vi­ous generations.

When look­ing at indus­try stan­dards, rela­tion­ship man­age­ment has made the suc­cess­ful tran­si­tion from ran­dom acts of con­tact to MAYBE where most clients have a next con­tact sched­ule in a CRM.

If you are ready for some­thing rad­i­cally dif­fer­ent, I would like to intro­duce you to Client Roadmap:  a pro­gram that allows you to set up Per­sonal Finan­cial Work­spaces for your clients.

What is a Per­sonal Finan­cial Work­space?  It is a secure col­lab­o­ra­tive work­space that allows you, clients and their pro­fes­sional advi­sors to share doc­u­ments, con­ver­sa­tions and infor­ma­tion in the cloud.

What can you do in a Per­sonal Finan­cial Work­space?  You can keep every­thing orga­nized.  You can set up a vault for pri­vate doc­u­ments.  You can sched­ule meet­ings and calls for the next six to twelve months (or more) and have Client Roadmap send out e-mail reminders.  You can set up task lists and assign tasks to you, your team, your clients or their pro­fes­sional advi­sors.  You can set up pages in which they can view infor­ma­tion about their invest­ments so they know what their invest­ment man­agers are doing and why.

Here’s a good exam­ple: A client phones look­ing for a doc­u­ment.  His doc­u­ment is filed some­where and you and your team go search­ing for it.  It takes hours and your client is frus­trated because he needed it yesterday.

With Client Roadmap, all of this client’s doc­u­ments are stored in his per­sonal finan­cial work­space.  He doesn’t need to call.  He just logs in and down­loads the document.

Another exam­ple: A client phones to ask about an invest­ment that she holds.  Sure you can do some research and send it to her.

With Client Roadmap, you set up a tab point­ing directly to pub­lic infor­ma­tion about the invest­ment:  A Morn­ingstar report or one that a fund com­pany updates reg­u­larly on their web­site.  If she wants to check out per­for­mance, infor­ma­tion about port­fo­lio hold­ings or about the invest­ment man­ager, it is all there in real time.

Another exam­ple:

A client is won­der­ing about the sta­tus of some­thing you have promised and calls you to get an update.  You aren’t sure so you ask your assis­tant, who looks it up and reports back to you and then you back to your client.

With Client Roadmap, your client logs into his work­space and right there on the home­page is a report of all out­stand­ing projects and their status.

Another exam­ple:

Your client’s accoun­tant needs infor­ma­tion to pre­pare her tax return.  You get writ­ten per­mis­sion to allow the accoun­tant to access her work­space and you pro­vide tem­po­rary access to allow him to find the infor­ma­tion he needs.  When that is com­plete, you click a but­ton and no more access.

Another exam­ple:

You are look­ing for a bet­ter way to get newslet­ters or quar­terly mar­ket com­ments to your clients.

With Client Roadmap, you can set up a feed directly in the client work­space and every time you update your newslet­ter it is updated and pre­vi­ous ver­sions stored in your pri­vate client workspace.

Final exam­ple:

You meet with a client and make notes about the meet­ing.  Your client asks you a ques­tion about some of the things you discussed.

In Client Roadmap, you put your client notes right on the front page of the work­space for your client to access at any time.  Plus, if he sees some­thing he does not agree with, he can make a com­ment right in the work­space and you get e-mail notification.

Sound com­pli­cated?  As with all tech­no­log­i­cal solu­tions, there is a learn­ing curve and set up time required.   We can help you to set up a tem­plate and then all you need to do is to clone the work­space.  New work­spaces can be set up with a new series of meet­ings and calls in approx­i­mately 20 min­utes.  You will eas­ily make this up through sit­u­a­tions like the exam­ples above.

Per­sonal Finan­cial Work­spaces allow you to work more col­lab­o­ra­tively and with full trans­parency.  These are two major pieces to more effec­tive client rela­tion­ship management.

Stop being aver­age and start being remark­able and your per­sonal and busi­ness per­for­mance will improve dramatically.

Bob Simp­son is Pres­i­dent of Syn­chronic­ity Per­for­mance Con­sul­tants.  Bob can be reached on his direct line at 905−502−0100, toll free at 866−646−6002 or by e-mail at bob.simpson@synchronicity.ca.

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Tags: Baby Boomers, Client Relationships, Collaborative Workspace, Compliance, Conversations, E Mail, Generations, Investment Managers, Investments, North America, Private Documents, Professional Advisors, Random Acts, Relationship Management, Reminders, Share Documents, Twelve Months, Undeniable Truth, Vault, Workspaces
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