5 Questions to Ask Now About Client Engagement

There are thousands of companies and products that market themselves as customer relationship management (CRM) solutions, ranging from industry behemoths to tiny niche products. Given the importance of relationships to financial advisors, it’s no surprise advisory and wealth management firms think they need a CRM system.

But is that really what they need? The reality is there are meaningful differences between CRM and an integrated advisor desktop (IAD), particularly for advisors who want to spend more time on meaningful client engagement, and less on mundane administrative tasks.

Here are a few issues to clarify now about these issues:

1. What problems are you trying to solve for?

Advisors usually have two imperatives: to keep their book of business, and to grow their book of business. They want a tool that will help them augment their ability to do so. Something that helps automate workflows, which frees more time to work with clients or prospects, and gives them the information they need to use that time effectively.

What pure CRM providers deliver, however, generally doesn’t give advisors that ability by itself. What advisors really need is an IAD.

2. What are the differences between a CRM and an IAD?

CRM is a component application that stores and retrieves information about a customer. An IAD is a “fabric” into which other applications are woven and can be viewed in context with each other.

For example, an advisor will often work with several applications — CRM, an onboarding application, a portfolio management application, a financial planning application, not to mention all the market news and trends an advisor needs to absorb and aggregate.

An IAD taps into all of those and gives an advisor a single view. Think of this as the advisor portal.

3. Why are IADs uniquely valuable to financial firms?

It’s right there in the name — this is an integrated ADVISOR desktop.