CRM: An Untapped Engine for Growth

Here again, CRM can add significant value by empowering the entire organization. By embedding workflows into the CRM system, tasks can be easily organized, assigned to team members and tracked—in effect, allowing anyone with the right permissions to know the exact status of a task at any moment and what needs to happen next. If a team member who is working on a client request is out of the office, another staff member can pick up the ball and fulfill that request in a consistent and timely manner. One firm I visited realizes that having “live” workflows in their CRM means that an update, made at any point by anyone, is immediately available and never seen as out-of-date.

3. Business analytics
As firms implement more of a CRM’s capabilities and house more information in the system, they can gain insight into key business metrics such as revenue per client and time spent on client tasks. This new intelligence can help a firm make more informed decisions. For example, some advisors have used CRM-based analytics to discover that segmenting their service offering or focusing on a particular client niche would result in higher profits. Internally, a firm can determine how long it takes employees or teams to complete their tasks, and allocate work and staff more efficiently.

As a firm examines its CRM usage and looks for opportunities to leverage these three overlooked functions or others that could benefit its business, it’s critical that they assess their needs up front. Rather than try to implement all these capabilities at once, it’s best to prioritize and start with the one or two capabilities that are most likely to address a significant pain point in the firm. Thoughtful implementation and employee adoption are critical to actualizing the benefits of the CRM, so it’s best to focus on these issues first and build from there.

CRM as a portal
The second key step in using CRM to drive and support RIAs’ growth strategies is cross-integration—enabling various systems to communicate with each other and work together to help bring maximum value to an RIA business. Technology integration can drive significant efficiency gains, freeing up employee time for more value-added activities. However, it’s a major hurdle for today’s RIAs—55% of whom told Schwab that integrating technology with existing systems is a top challenge.

The key to effective technology integration is to identify a system that can be the hub of the business—the application that will serve as the primary “desktop” for the majority of your employees. Once this hub is identified, you can gather important data from other key technologies in the office, including the portfolio management system, custodial system, email system and document management system, and feed it to the hub.

We believe that the right hub for an RIA is the CRM, for several reasons. RIAs’ biggest value proposition is their expertise in client relationship management. CRM, of course, is the tool that provides them with the most comprehensive view of their client relationships—not just assets, but their communications and interactions, their life events, key relationships and investment decisions. What’s more, CRM is probably used by more members of an advisory firm’s staff than another technology, thanks to the vital client information it contains. In many ways, it’s already the go-to technology for the majority of advisors’ teams.

The ultimate goal is to make the CRM the window to all the other technologies in the office—a first stop for team members to find the key information they need to provide timely, high-quality and consistent client service across the board. With this, virtually anyone at a firm can get a holistic view of clients’ financial pictures in one central location immediately, and address requests quickly and efficiently as a result.

Consider, for example, a situation in which negative news breaks about a major U.S. company. An important client sees the headlines and calls your firm, worried about whether he owns shares in the company and, if so, the size of his position. In a typical non-integrated office, addressing this request might require transferring the client to someone else or calling the client back after cobbling together information from the portfolio management system and other technology tools. In an integrated office where the CRM serves as the hub, the advisor can immediately pull up the client’s CRM record and see positions data, real-time account balances, updates from custodians and other information needed to answer the client’s question with no delay.

Clearly, the value of a CRM-centric approach increases substantially as firms grow, add staff and assign multiple team members to each client. With the CRM serving as the hub, all team members are always on the same page and able to provide superior service. The bottom line: As firms grow, they can maintain—even strengthen—the high-touch, personal connections they have built with their clients over the years.

In the end, it’s important to remember that CRM—like any technology—is not a magic bullet that will solve all the issues that advisors must address. Due to its robust, cross-firm capabilities, any technology must be selected carefully, implemented thoughtfully based on a firm’s needs, and adopted widely by employees in order for practices to experience the benefits. However, there is no question that advisors who fully leverage CRM’s extensive capabilities and integrate it with other key technologies will put themselves in the best possible position to grow their practices, maximize their efficiency, and deliver world-class service to their clients. Ultimately, those advisors can build highly successful practices positioned to thrive for years and decades to come.