Working Through Today's Top Operational Challenges
Advisors today wear many hats, and part of our job is to help them manage client expectations and exceed their business goals as efficiently as possible. Our business consulting experts spend much of their time in advisors’ offices helping them evaluate and better manage their businesses.
Based on recent observations, these are the top operational hurdles facing independent advisors today:
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Fully integrating and utilizing technology – The vast majority of advisors are not maximizing the technological capabilities on the market. If you’re only capturing snippets of client data digitally, you’re doing it all wrong. We strongly encourage advisors to document every client interaction in an effort to boost operational efficiency. Strive to adopt a robust customer relationship management (CRM) tool that meets the needs of your business.
We recently introduced a series of updates to our technology offerings, including enhancements to our AdvisorComplete system. Here, we can directly integrate your favorite tools onto one platform, providing a total overview of client data and operational information.
We also recently integrated eMoney’s technology which provides access to a document vault, client portal, and account aggregation tools. You can access the eMoney integration through a one-step sign-on to AdvisorComplete. This robust planning tool allows you to easily perform goals-based or cash flow planning on behalf of clients. The eMoney portal integrates with third-party applications such as Smarsh, AdvisorEnterprise - Powered by Envestnet, and Fidelity and permits automatic document sharing between you and your clients.
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Documenting office operations – Given the complexity of the advisory business, documenting operations tends to fall by the wayside. Small offices in particular often struggle to record operational procedures due to their limited bandwidth. Regardless of your office size, it’s critical for the future of your business to have this information in order to help combat potential problems like employee turnover.
We encourage you to take full advantage of the trainings offered through Kestra Financial. We’re here to accommodate your schedule and can host your team in our home office, hold trainings over the phone or via webinars to help you develop your own office operations manual.
Once an operations model is in place, you must constantly monitor staff performance for compliance and work to identify inefficiencies in the back office. In addition to the required onboarding training, we recommend ongoing trainings for growing teams, especially when implementing new technology, to continue maximizing performance.
We understand that your day-to-day is hectic, and we’re here as a resource to help make your business function as smoothly as possible so you can maximize your time serving clients. For more information on how we can help you overcome operational inefficiencies, click here.
