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

Posted on March 23, 2012 by Bob Simpson No Comments

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.