Between the COVID-19 pandemic causing banking and capital markets professionals to work remotely and the structural shifts that are taking place across the financial ecosystem, efficient communication is more important than ever.
Tier1 Chief Product Officer Manish Patel and Joe Vaccarella, CEO of Client Instant Access, take a look at how firms can ensure workflows and communication are smooth and secure through the utilization of multi-channel communication and industry specific CRMs.
Advancements in technology are helping sales, research and trading desks with more collaborative components to help them optimize their client relationships. Buy and sell-side firms have voiced that exchanging ideas and working together to achieve common goals around technology innovation is the optimal route.
Fintech partners feel the same way and are increasingly collaborating on ideas and integrating their solutions to create a more efficient and streamlined workflow for all capital markets participants.
In this piece, we’ll be taking a look at why the marriage of customer relationship management (CRM) tools and multi-channel engagement technology is the perfect fit for today’s structural and regulatory landscape.
What Multi-Channel Communication and CRMs Bring to the Table
Managing a trading desk is already a loaded job, so streamlining your technology suite has to be a top priority to help ensure a productive workday. It’s imperative that managers dispose of the inefficiencies that can linger on sales and research desks such as weeding through spreadsheets, as these processes can consume an exorbitant amount of time in what is usually a hectic schedule.
Seamless Communication
A robust CRM that’s supported by multi-channel communication tools streamline business processes and reinforces compliance protocols. This alliance of solutions allows you to communicate with your clients seamlessly via greater computer telephony integration (CTI) connectivity, whether by one-click-to dial, text, email or blast a voicemail. By taking the time to identify and develop relationships with premium technology partners, daily workflows are drastically improved which empowers company-wide innovation.
Unified Communication
Unified communication is critical in today’s evolving marketplace. Getting there, however, can be challenging. While communication is often disparate and siloed across multiple platforms, a more productive approach leverages a unified platform that is purpose-built for financial services.
This allows users to quickly maximize calling, incoming call notifications, SMS, and email without having to exit their CRM. Capturing detailed activity history directly within your CRM across bulk and direct interactions not only saves time but also ensures accuracy over outdated manual entry processes.
Streamlined Efficiency through Automation
Although daily forecasts and weekly reports are two of the key value-add services that clients expect from research analysts, leaving messages for clients each morning is a cumbersome and time-consuming task. Pre-recorded messages covering multiple topics can alleviate this issue for both the end user and the analyst. Messages can be blasted to clients overnight and available each morning as one of their top priorities.
Through a combination of CIA’s and Tier1’s offerings, market participants achieve a more seamless route to the pieces of research they want to hear about, using features such as Click-to-Dial. CIA’s Click-to-Dial saves users nearly 12 minutes for every 10 calls made and an hour for every 50 calls. By the end of a full work-week, this translates to almost an entire extra day of time saved that can be repurposed toward servicing clients and developing research.
Regulatory Compliance
In addition to saving time, there’s a compliance facet of working with vendors. CIA is SOC2-certified and has been engineered to meet critical regulatory guidelines, while Tier1 manages the increasing levels of relationship risk that exist between buy and sell-side counterparties in an increasingly regulated financial landscape.
Additional Benefits
With call lists more strategically organized and rapidly processed, users reach a wider audience through increased processing speed. As the number of calls per session increases, so will the likelihood of reaching clients for a one-on-one conversation. In instances where a live answer does not occur, a user can easily leave a pre-recorded message guaranteeing a rich, client touchpoint.
Interaction data gathered by the system can effectively be used to provide client engagement insights to enhance a communication strategy. For example, the CIA offering delivers a Best Call Time metric that will define the hours of the day a client is most likely to answer a call live. Such insights that are integrated with a CRM will allow a user to organize their day and ensure the most valuable outcomes from their engagement efforts.
Subsequently, having access to data on the best call time increases the chance of successfully delivering your message and fostering the relationship.
When encountering a situation where contacts do not want to be called, there’s the option of sending a message from your CRM. Sometimes a succinct text message is all a client may need. In addition, you have the option to still send a standard email with the latest research report as an attachment, helping to ensure a more personal relationship with the client while letting them know that you have their interests in mind.
In either case, users benefit from built-in efficiency, robust CTI connectivity and a compliant technology suite, allowing them to focus on their message instead of the laborious data-input process.
Leveraging the Next Generation Cloud CTI
Collaboration between technology providers and end-users drives greater efficiency, scalability and flexibility. For professionals across capital markets, collaboration helps convert bulk outbound activities into high-value engagements and multi-channel inbound inquiries.
By using a communications resource that integrates CRM and telephony capabilities, users can initiate a high-value, one-on-one engagement through multiple channels. Whether through voice, SMS or email, this approach allows sales and research personnel to conveniently contact a client while having the interaction automatically recorded and create bulk engagements that reach large audiences with minimal time investment.
Maximizing the functionality of your relationship management tools and merging them with multi-channel engagement technology streamlines the pursuit of generating high-value relationships. Tier1’s open architecture, single pane of glass view provides end users with the flexibility they need, while CIA is the catalyst that makes visibility simple, allowing research analysts and salespeople to easily get in front of clients.
From trivial items such as converting a missed call into an SMS conversation to more onerous tasks such as organizing an entire client list, the marriage of CIA’s and Tier1’s premium services creates a glide path to greater customer engagement and optimal end-user performance.
For more insights into the benefits that multi-channel communication and industry specific CRMs can have for your business, contact us today.
About Client Instant Access, LLC
Client Instant Access, LLC was founded in 1997 and is headquartered in Parsippany, N.J. Our state-of-the-art dialing, messaging and conferencing services have made us a leader in the telecommunications industry, and we are the provider of choice on Wall Street and for financial institutions around the world.
Co-founder and CEO Joe Vaccarella has over twenty years of conference calling and messaging experience, while the rest of the seasoned senior management team boasts over fifty years of diversified telecommunications experience. CIA employs approximately 100 professionals and maintains a 24-hour on-site conference calling and customer service support center to meet our clients’ needs.
We offer the fastest, most productive and reliable systems available in the marketplace to a wide variety of industries. We also provide detailed reporting, feature-rich options, compliance tools and database management resources that rival other companies’ much more expensive Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems.
If your company wishes to integrate our services into an existing platform, we have developed a robust Application Programming Interface (API) that accomplishes this with ease. At CIA, we look forward to innovatively helping our clients meet and exceed their business goals.