Six Steps to Better Client Data Management
Michelle Leversedge, Senior Advice Technology Consultant
One of the biggest hurdles we see advice practices struggling to overcome is their ability to manage client data while keeping it accurate and up to date.
Does that sound familiar to you? If it does, you’re not alone.
Data integrity is one of the most important areas of an advice firm, yet it’s the one that principals struggle to find the best solutions to maintain. Out of date client data will not only cause frustrations for you and your team, it will also impact reporting, the quality of merged advice documents and it can rear its head as a serious compliance risk.
For example, archived clients might suddenly appear in your client list and deceased clients may appear in documents or even worse, receive communication from you. Or you might miss reviews or anniversary dates, which can cause enormous stress when you realise you haven’t delivered on your service offering to the client and have missed your legal obligations.
From a business perspective having reliable client data will help you track your key business metrics, understand your client demographics and implement appropriate segmentation within your client base.
Of course, having the right client data not only helps you understand your clients better and the services they are using, it also makes sure your clients have a better experience with your firm.
So what can you do to get on top of the situation?
It’s often a big job to clean up your client data, but it will bring enormous benefits to your business when implemented. Not only will you be able to sleep at night knowing you have the correct client data, but business efficiencies will also now be more effective without the need to double-check client documents and tasks. We’ve created a six-step checklist to help you get started.
1. Review your Client List
This is often the biggest frustration for many team members - duplications. Especially when information gets allocated to multiple client profiles. Check if there are any duplications and while you’re doing that, remove any archived clients or old prospects still appearing in your client list. Now it means you have a ‘clean’ client list for reporting and will remove all the unnecessary noise for your team.
2. Client Category and Entity Status
Two fields that pack a punch for efficiency, are often not utilised correctly. The ‘client category’ field will help you segment your client base and assist with identifying your service offering. The ‘entity status’ will help with identifying current, archived, prospect or deceased clients. Both will help you segment your client base effectively and can be used in search criteria to help define your reporting.
3. Internal Roles
It’s common to have the wrong staff or even ex-staff still appearing in these roles. When using threads/tasks and templates it’s important to have the right person in the correct role, otherwise you’ll have a breakdown in the workflow process - you might even have tasks go missing as a result. There is an ability to set up ‘autoset for client’ under the adviser, this will pre-populate all internal roles for the team. Just make sure someone in the business is responsible for updating the system when there are staff changes.
4. Review Management
Within your Review Management section, you can make sure every client who is required to receive a review has a date allocated. Not only can you produce reports from this area, which will help you do more effective forward planning, you can also set up Scheduler to automatically send an email to the client to book in the review meeting.
5. FDS, Opt-In and Fee Consent
One of the key steps in meeting your legal obligations and ensuring you continue to receive your fees is making sure you have your ongoing service fee processes right. In order to do that, you need to have task management for your service offerings automated, the right reporting in place and clients scheduled for meetings within the right date parameters. Your technology has the right capabilities to keep you on time and compliant.
6. Using the Client Builder (Fact Find wizard)
Using the Client Builder wizard for entering client data is a lot easier than going from page to page within XPLAN. Our fact-finding solution, which supports simple and complex client data collection, is built around a single flexible template and it’s all powered using XPLAN. Not only does it allow you to onboard clients more effectively, it can also help you maintain up to date data with your clients on an annual basis.
So how can you get help?
We always encourage our new clients to involve their staff with any XPLAN training offered by Iress. This is the best way to understand the full features available within the system.
If you’re part of the Enzumo community you’ll also have access to our MasterXplan, which offers a significant amount of training material for XPLAN users - a great resource for you and your team.
Lastly, reach out to us for a discussion. Let us help you navigate what you need and develop the right implementation plan.