Looking for ways to accelerate your financial reps’ effectiveness through integrated, seamless experiences? At this year’s Hearsay Summit, Dennis Craig, VP, MGA & National Account Relationships at RBC, and Chris Johnson, AVP, Advisor Marketing and Communication, at Janney Montgomery Scott, shared the following keys to their success in transforming field success:  

Deliver electronic nudges at the right moment

With the largest book of business for disability insurance in Canada, RBC offers a coverage product for physicians that’s designed specifically to grow with them as they leave medical school and their incomes increase. Unfortunately, there wasn’t an efficient way to identify evidence of increased income. One option was sending a letter to note that the policy provision was up, but these suffered from low uptake rate, since physicians were hard to reach by phone and email, let alone mail.

With 89% of Canadians using text messaging daily, and 75% willing to receive communications from a trusted advisor, Dennis knew that texting was a viable way to move the needle when it came to speed of response. Even better, the average text response time is about 90 seconds. “We thought that’s a better medium than the letter that sits in a pile of paper somewhere…how do we give the customer an electronic nudge to say, ‘Hey, this offer is here. Love to reach out to help you, and see if there’s anything we could do,” he says.

Using Hearsay Actions, this electronic nudge could be done on behalf of the advisor. In RBC’s case, a text is automatically sent to physicians to alert them that their provision was expiring. Dennis says that advisors love the fact that texts look and feel like they come from the advisor. “If the customer responded, it went to the advisor. But of course through Hearsay Relate, we could track what was happening and get feedback from the advisor: What was actually happening in terms of who was responding? What did those responses look like? What did that lead to, in terms of next action or next activity?”

For Dennis, the ability to communicate quickly and compliantly with the end-customer—through the actual advisor—is a win-win for everyone.

Increase velocity of client response

Chris echoed Dennis’ view, saying that texting is critical to accelerating client response times. Advisors would complain to him about never getting replies to their clients’ emails, or leaving voicemails only to have days go by before they even heard back.

Now two years into their texting program, Relate has become an important efficiency tool for Janney’s practice. Rather than picking up the phone to let a client know that a check or completed form was received, a quick text acknowledgement kept the client up to date, while saving the adviser up to 15 minutes, allowing him or her to respond to more incoming phone calls.

The almost instantaneous responses advisors receive from clients continues to amaze Chris. “Five minutes is the average response time from a client to an advisor’s text message,” he says. “Everyone’s phone is always within their arms’ reach.”

Meet the customer where they are

Because clients routinely access the Janney online portal to check account balances, or upload documents and forms, Chris and his team wanted to better leverage the portal to deepen client connection. To enable advisors to share an approved, compliant message on their client’s online access dashboard, Janney built a strategic integration between Hearsay and their client portal.

For Chris and the Janney team,  this integration really “came into play last year, when markets were volatile.” For advisers to be able to share a calming message of reassurance, and “land exactly where the clients were looking” was integral to their value of having advisors be where their clients are. The latter was the reason that led Janney to integrate the dashboard and online portal in the first place.

A huge thanks to Dennis and Chris for sharing their stories of agent and advisor effectiveness!