Workflow. You’ve either got it, or you haven’t. If you’re finding the advice journey isn’t quite as plain sailing as it should be, it’s time your technology took one for the team.
You’ve got your way of doing things. That’s cool, all advisory firms have. It’s what sets you apart from the others.
There will be similarities, of course, as you’d expect with businesses in the same industry operating under the same regulation. But the way you serve clients and fulfil your obligations will be different from the firm down the road.
You’ll have a back-office system and preferred third-party applications. You may or may not use paper. More often than not, you’ll use a mixture of all of them to get the job done.
Is there a more efficient way of doing things?
Probably.
If you look at the things you do, day in day out, you can probably identify quicker, better ways of doing them.
It might only be a small and incremental improvement, but other changes could lead to transformational efficiency gains if you made them. And that’s where it starts to get interesting.
The difference an effective workflow can make on a business can be truly magical. Fewer unnecessary steps, a better picture of where you are in a process, and everyone knows what they should be doing and when.
Sounds good, doesn’t it? So how do you get to such a place?
This is where your technology needs to step up and take one for the team.
Just go with the workflow
Lots of systems can remind you to do a job, but a perfect workflow system would also complete some of that task for you and only flag up other tasks if they’re needed.
Imagine you have a linear process such as Task 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5. What if Task 4 only needs to happen if Task 3 has a specific outcome? Wouldn’t it be more useful if your software was intuitive enough to deviate from that path based on different outcomes that may happen through that process?
For instance, what if you only need to see a task to obtain manual forms of identity and verification if the previous task to complete an online verification fails? You can do this in Xplan by adding outcomes to your workflow thread tasks and changing the next task’s activation criteria.
Conditional workflow can be applied to many different parts of the advice journey. Xplan users are using it to improve processes such as pre-sale compliance checks, ID&V failures, post-sale case checking, telesales and pipeline processes, and that’s only the start.
Role with it
The most powerful workflows allow the right tasks to go to the right people or team at the right time.
Within Xplan’s workflow, you can set a task for:
- a specific user within the business (e.g. a pre-check to a particular compliance officer in the firm)
- a group or team within your business (e.g. case handover from an adviser into a paraplanner pool)
- a role against the client (e.g. the assigned adviser or administrator) or a group role (e.g. the manager of a team who delegates the work).
Also, tasks within a workflow can work on your behalf.
Do you want to update a client by email as you pass certain stages in the workflow? No problem. Just set a task to auto-send an email template to the client upon the setting of a specific outcome. Voila!
What about adding a review schedule and a service category/benchmark at the end of the advice journey? You got it. Just include those outcome conditions, so it adds them to the client record automatically. Easy!
And how about automatically updating an associated lead or opportunity stage or status? The outcomes do that too. Boom!
Does your advice system do all that?
Xplan’s workflow can create documentation or reports to share with clients either by post or straight to their client portal. And after producing those documents, can schedule meetings automatically. It’s a brilliant time and cost saver, no digging about for files here; you’ll always have the satisfaction of being able to locate a specific document quickly.
It’s suddenly all become clear
We looked at the benefits of Xplan’s dashboard in a previous blog. Using the same functionality, you can drill down for an even smoother, more efficient workflow. Its many widgets will help you see the bigger picture of what’s happening across your business.
The result is a more transparent and visual understanding of how the workflow is progressing, where the blockers are in the process, and what actions you need to take - at a glance - to gain even more efficiencies.
Ready for a better workflow? Discover more about Xplan here.
