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Subject0:
Retail Stock Brokerage and Wealth Management
From0:
Category0:
Date: 01 Mar 2007
Time: 05:35:37 +1000
Remote Name: 91.124.147.113
Retail Stock Brokerage and Wealth Management Firms Enhance Customer Equity with
Sage CRM
by: Manish Kumar
i
The recent stock market boom in India has resulted in a lot of erstwhile small
to mid sized stock brokers expanding to become larger in size and scale with a
network of sub brokers and an extensive direct sales team to cater to the
increasing number of individual investors in the market. Retail brokerages have
also diversified to extend Wealth Management services covering stock trading,
investments in mutual funds, insurance products, and a host of other retail
financial products. The focus has also been on advisory services to strengthen
the �stickiness� in their relationship. We now have a new breed of �relationship
managers� that dot the financial services business. This sudden business
expansion has made it imperative for these companies to adopt new technologies
and proven best practices in CRM to ensure customer satisfaction, profitability
and productivity.
Challenges
Typically, brokerages advertise in various media to generate enquiries. Leads
get generated through e-mail, phone-ins, web registrations or walk-ins and are
generally captured at their in-house Call Center. These are then routed by the
Customer Service team to the concerned sales person, sub broker or agent based
on location and expertise. These leads are further qualified, profiled and their
credit worthiness checked before initiating a relationship with them. If the
leads are managed and allocated manually, it is quite possible that a number of
them may slip through the cracks and get lost. Furthermore, brokerage companies
spend huge amounts of money on advertising and other campaigns. Since there is
no established process to track the effectiveness of these campaigns and
calculate the return on investment from business generated through these leads,
the company is unable to determine which marketing program is actually driving
increased business and often unable to optimize their Marketing investments.
After an account is set up the customer starts building up his investment
portfolio through trading and other investments. In the course of these
transactions, he is likely to have a number of queries or issues related to
system access, funds credit, account status, asset appreciation and other
updates. These queries and complaints need to be captured and addressed in a
timely fashion or escalated for intervention and action while maintaining
acceptable turnaround times.Time is of essence in this business therefore any
delays in responding to customer issues can result in customer dissatisfaction
and potential attrition. The company also needs to maintain internal timeline
service commitments for responding to queries to ensure that their customers
remain satisfied. Automated systems are required to ensure the right persons are
involved to address specific issues with proper controls and an escalation
process in place. Detailed trading and investment information of customers is
generally available in disparate systems depending on the investment type,
namely, stock trades, insurance, mutual funds. Since this cannot be easily
accessed by the customer service team, they are sometimes unable to respond to
simple customer queries in real-time. If data on customer transactions were to
be made available to the customer service team, they would have a 360 degree
view of the customer which would greatly reduce the time taken to address
customer issues and improve customer delight.
Solution
Sage CRM is an easy to use, fast to deploy, feature rich Customer Relationship
Management software with out-of-box and configurable business processes. With
modules for sales, marketing and customer service. Sage CRM comes with features
such as lead management, sales automation, customer service, campaign
management, interactive Dashboards and reports.
Using Sage CRM, leads can be managed across multiple channels like Phone,
E-mail, SMS, Web enquiries, and Walkins. Leads are tracked from first contact to
final closure with a well defined work flow that has built in assignment and
escalation rules. An example of this would be where a sales person �on the move�
gets a lead assigned to him on his mobile via SMS based on his territorial
responsibility. He is therefore able to take action instantly and efficiently
utilize his time on the road. It also enables the sales team to effectively
analyze and manage the sales pipeline and review the history of each prospect,
hence reducing administrative tasks to a minimum. Sales representatives and
managers can have instant access to sales reports, graphs and forecasts for
immediate analysis and decision-making.
Sage CRM customer service enables the Call center of the brokerage house to
streamline call ins, E-mails and other contact points into a central repository
and enable a smooth interaction with end customers. With Computer Telephony
Integration (CTI), Sage CRM enables a seamless handover process from call-ins.
The Customer service rep can retrieve the appropriate customer record to quickly
address customer issues. Similar process is established with e-mails sent in by
customers. Information availability is complete with the necessary integration
of Sage CRM with back-end transaction systems which makes the job of the
Customer service rep even more seamless. The solution also tracks every customer
interaction which ensures that the most up-to-date information is available. It
helps users adhere to work-flow processes whereby customer issues that remain
inactive for a predefined period of time, are automatically escalated. By
enabling bidirectional exchange of customer data and consolidation of customer
transaction and communication information on a single screen, Sage CRM provides
customer service professionals with a 360-degree view of the customer. They can
access relevant information including transactions, calls and escalation history
and all communication sent and received. The built-in reporting function comes
in a userfriendly and presentable format so that details of customer issues and
requests can be analyzed easily.
Benefits
Sage CRM offers the following key business benefits to stock brokerage and
wealth management firms :
1. Streamlines the Lead Management process thereby ensuring that leads are not
lost.
2. Build up Risk profiles of customers to leverage future product selling
opportunities.
3. Integrate the Call center with the Sales and Operations teams to offer a
seamless experience to customers.
4. Enable relationship managers to have a 360� view of their customers thereby
ensuring a more proactive approach to managing them.
5. Integrate disparate systems within the organization thereby eliminating
'silos' of information and improving operational efficiencies.
6. Improve customer servicing capabilities with better response times and more
empowered customer service reps which in turn leads to higher customer
satisfaction levels.
To know more about Sage CRM Solutions you can visit http://www.sagesoftware.co.in
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