With COVID-19 restrictions on how we work, using technology to communicate with clients remotely has become fundamental for financial planning businesses. We explore examples of how adopting these new digital solutions can benefit your whole business, as well as client relationships.

Even if you weren’t on board with virtual client meetings before, 2020 has made technology essential for supporting remote working practices in financial advice. So how can you get up to speed with video calls, online diary management and other solutions for best-practice digital communication with clients?

Your virtual meeting workflow

Long before we were all forced to work remotely by COVID-19, financial planners were already offering remote appointments just to make life easier. Two of them are Felicity Cooper AFP^® from Cooper Wealth Management and Charles Badenach CFP^® from Main Street Financial Solutions.

According to Charles, around half of client meetings at the practice were conducted on Zoom before the COVID-19 pandemic made it impossible to meet in person.  “For some time now it’s been much more efficient for many of our clients to have virtual meetings with our team members,” says Charles. “It’s just as easy to share your screen and talk things through. We usually send key documentation to clients before the meeting and then use the snip tool to record other issues we highlight on the screen to send to the client and save these as file notes on our Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system.”

Even for face-to-face meetings, Charles prefers to record key comments and next steps in audio format and add these to the client file. He’ll use either the voice memo app on his iPhone or Dragon Dictation if he needs a text version of the file note.

Felicity’s team at Cooper Wealth Management also introduced Zoom meetings as an option for all clients making an appointment in their online booking system. “If clients choose to have a virtual meeting, Zoom is set-up to send the calendar invite and meeting link to both planner and client,” says Felicity. “It also automatically records the meeting, so both parties have a complete record of the discussion and next steps.”

Charles and his team have found that recording video calls has made a big difference to their work and output as schedules and locations have become more flexible during COVID-19. “We’ve sometimes had client meetings on Zoom where one team member hasn’t been able to dial in. The recording function makes it easy to share the media file with that person via DropBox so they can view it at home and stay informed.”

Charles and Felicity use an integrated online calendar to manage all appointments, including virtual ones. For both their practices, diary management had been a headache that technology could remedy. “All the back and forth communication it took to agree on a time to meet was really inefficient,” says Charles. “With an online booking system it just makes things easier for everyone involved.” Charles and team use Calendly for one-on-one meetings and Doodle for multi-attendant meetings, while Cooper Wealth Management have implemented ScheduleOnce. All three apps integrate with video meeting tools like Zoom, Microsoft Teams and Webex.

Digital solutions for scale and efficiency

Although Felicity and Charles have a strong personal interest in technology and trying out new apps, they also agree that tech is only worth investing in if it solves a problem for your business. “Any idea we trial has to either make someone’s life better or support a more sustainable business,” says Felicity. “No one wants to be wasting time or do things they don’t want to do, whether they’re your clients or your team.”

“There are always new technology solutions coming up,” says Charles. “In the early days it was tempting to try everything out just for the sake of it, but now we take a solution-led approach. Where the team identify a road block we look at whether technology can help us in some way to remove or reduce the inefficiency. Any app that can help you scale up your business in a compliant way is worth investing in and taking time to implement.” 

Back office efficiency = Better customer experience

From using adviserlogic as their CRM to experimenting with NOD for document production, the Main Street approach is very much about making sure back office systems are set up to keep pace with what clients expect. “We have internal tools which help systemise and automate many of the processes and then we have external tools that are focussed on improving the client experience,” says Charles. “Customer-facing technologies like Zoom, Calendly, Textpander  and Vestorly – a newsletter tool we’re looking at trialling – can definitely make it easier to stay connected with clients and keep them informed and engaged. It’s also about delivering a consistent outcome to clients that is constantly evolving and improving. What worked yesterday is not necessarily going to work tomorrow.”

For example, Main Street want their team to stay informed about what’s happening for their industry and their clients. But it’s easy for people to get inundated and distracted by the many updates and news feeds hitting their inboxes in a single day. “It’s easy to either ignore these emails altogether or find yourself going off task when one arrives,” says Charles. “So we’ve set up a workflow using Zapier to keep all news and updates together in one place. When emails come in, they’re sorted into categories, saved as a PDF using CloudConvert and then transferred to our Slack dashboard. This is where all team members can view and self-serve client information and industry updates all sorted into folders, with open access or password protection applied as appropriate. It’s a system that makes information and knowledge management work far more efficiently for our whole business.  It puts everyone back in control of their inbox.

A must-have for compliance  

Charles agrees that regulation has made working life very challenging for financial planners. But he is also confident that the technology is there to help financial planners solve for regulatory complexity at scale and also reduce the potential for human error that can lead to unintended breaches.

“Having a human solely responsible for managing the many checklists, processes, forms and documents that support the advice process is completely unrealistic,” says Charles. “Gone are the days when one individual could manage all this, inevitably mistakes will happen if they try. This is why access to technology is so essential. It’s not a blocker, it’s an enabler that can automate processes ensuring that step two cannot happen before step one has been done. This reduces the risk of error and allows advisers to deliver advice in a more consistent, compliant and profitable way.”

Looking to explore technology solutions for your financial planning business? Get further insights on a sprint approach to implementing technology and explore more Fintech resources from the FPA.