4 Reasons AX is One of Your Firm’s Best Retention Tools

There’s a lot of talk these days about CX, or Client Experience, which can be used to refer to pretty much any interaction a client has with a company, and it is often used to refer to any piece of technology a client uses to interact with a company. 

It makes sense that CX gets so much attention. Clients and customers make the business world go around – especially in the world of finance.

But there’s another _X that can make a huge difference in how you run your financial institution, and that’s AX – Advisor Experience. In short, AX is the technology your team uses to do their jobs, including everything from emailing clients to executing trades to running a client meeting. 

While AX often takes a backseat to CX, the role it plays in advisor recruiting and retention can hardly be overstated. 

A top-tier AX has an impact on scaling, efficiency and effectiveness, inevitably leading to increased team satisfaction and much more! Today, we want to look at four ways the right AX can have a positive impact on recruiting and retention at your financial institution.

1. Increase Loyalty

The latest and greatest technology can leave a lasting impression on anyone who interacts with your firm, whether they’re on your team or not. But no one will interact with it as much as the people who work at your company, and the tools you give them have a big impact on how they feel about where they work.

It’s true, if you’re looking to raise up brand evangelists from within your team, your tech will matter a lot. According to JD Power’s 2022 Advisor Satisfaction Survey, among advisors with the highest levels of satisfaction and loyalty (those classified as “brand evangelists”), 91% say the technology offered by their firm has improved during the past two years and 79% say their firm offers competitive products.

Bottom line: Advisors want to help their clients, and bad technology makes it hard for them to do that. They want to go to a place where they know they have the right tools and technology to support their business and their advice to clients.

2. A Good AX Delivers Deep Client Insights

At Wealth Access, our mission is to make it easy for financial institutions to access the information they need to help transform their clients’ lives. To that end, our Insights application provides a layer of data that enables you to unify all books and records along with client data, resulting in a complete picture of every client. 

There’s an important next step that a lot of tech providers miss, and that is making the information accessible to your team, which we do through the use of role-based dashboards. We pull a lot of information together, which can be overwhelming to make sense of, so we solved that by allowing you to create customized dashboards based on what data each person at your company needs to see.

When you give your team the information they need, they can better identify and mitigate risk and identify additional opportunities with their clients.

3. Better AX Enables Your Top-Performing Advisors to Do Their Best

It’s no secret that at any given firm, probably fewer than half of advisors have a sufficient breadth of knowledge about the technology they use every day. They can do their job just fine without leaving their comfort zone, so why would they try something new?

Then you have your top performers, the advisors who understand the power of technology and leverage it to get more done faster. These are the advisors who push the limits of what your system can do. Put them in a bad system, and they will very quickly begin looking for somewhere with better tech that doesn’t hold them back as much. 

Or maybe the problem isn’t that your technology is outdated, maybe it’s simply underutilized – a common problem we see at a lot of banks and firms. 

Let’s face it, Salesforce is a gigantic tool that can do pretty much anything you want, so there’s always something else you could be doing with it. We built Wealth Access for Salesforce Financial Services Cloud specifically to help financial firms zero in on the parts of Salesforce that can make them most effective.

4. Remote is No Longer Optional

One of our user firms in Texas had a really bad ice storm last year and lost power and no one could go into the office because the weather was so bad. A lot of their systems were on-premises, meaning you could only access them when you were in the office. Their entire company was frozen – in more ways than one. 

Since they used Wealth Access, their team was still able to pull up balance sheets on their phones and tablets and continue to conduct meetings and assist clients. 

It’s not just in emergency situations, either. Wealth Access allows your advisors to access and navigate all client data from anywhere, whether they’re meeting with a client at a coffee shop or working from home in Hawaii. 

Remote is no longer an option. In fact, 62% of workers say they work remotely at least some of the time. If you’re not set up to allow your team some flexibility on when and where they work, then chances are they will look for a firm that is. 

Level Up Your AX with Wealth Access

Want to see the difference a better AX could make at your firm? Schedule a demo of Wealth Access today.