From an advisor’s point of view, not all investors are created equal – in addition to the obvious differences in assets, age, employment and lifestyle, different people have different levels of receptivity to the advice and assistance an advisor can provide. At the same time, an investor’s position is not fixed: It changes with time and in response to outside influences. So how can an advisor best tailor the experience they provide to each unique and evolving individual, multiplied by the size of the advisor’s book?
Advances in the power and accessibility of artificial intelligence (AI) holds part of the answer. While machine learning and AI can’t replace the kind of nuanced relationship and tailored advice an advisor can offer, it is very good at helping track an investor’s place in the customer lifecycle, highlight opportunities for an advisor to add special value, and use the power of big data to identify patterns no single person could see.
Finding efficiency and opportunity in customer data
The goal of lifecycle management is to ensure an advisor is offering the right level and type of support for each investor as their situation changes. In the old days, that just meant tracking a person’s income, how far they were from retirement and a few other basic data points and then following a decision tree.
Today, with advisors managing more relationships than ever, an overload of data coming in across many touchpoints, and elevated customer expectations, the task is much tougher. Fortunately, advanced analytics and AI can provide support in several ways:
- Providing nudges based on best practices: At the most basic level, technology can track more data more efficiently than an advisor pulled in many directions. Keeping up with key dates, recognizing changes to data inputs, and suggesting next best actions to advisors when a trigger is noted (also accounting for a firm’s policies and approach) helps prevent relationships from slipping through the cracks.
- Surfacing opportunities hidden in communications: Tools can scrub through unstructured data that might exist in any of several places – in an advisor’s email inbox, transcripts of calls, data in a CRM, and other sources – and pick out clues that could slip by in the flood of information – hints at a promotion or relocation, changes in family status, and other lifecycle-changing events. With these, AI can suggest an advisor take a closer look at an investor and see if there is a new opportunity.
- Reducing the time and effort of staying connected: Every investor is important, but some should naturally draw more of an advisor’s time and attention. For those investors who are at a point that requires less attention, automated communications from the advisor can help keep lines open. Systems can also identify interesting content based on an individual’s profile and queue it up for an advisor to send, keeping a personalized link.
- Using real-time data to account for changing markets: Sophisticated systems will come up with next-best-action recommendations based on not just an advisor’s personal book, but data from a huge set of advisor/investor interactions. This helps account for changing market conditions and lets machine learning algorithms draw upon a much larger dataset to develop even more refined suggestions.
Enhancing the advisor/client relationship with NexJ’s Nudge-AI Suite
NexJ’s Nudge-AI Suite offers access to the benefits of AI-powered lifecycle management to advisors without the need to stand up a whole new system. These modules can plug into your existing CRM, investment, and market data platforms to deliver insights, or can be included in a NexJ Integrated Advisor Desktop solution that provides a specific, integrated view of everything an advisor needs:
- NexJ Engage: Suggests next-best-actions to better serve clients and remain compliant
- NexJ Inform: Offers tailored content suggestions and can help automate advisor outreach
- NexJ Insights: Searches through data to enable a better advisor understanding of an investor
Since NexJ solutions were built from the ground for the financial industry, our clients can benefit faster – special customization is not required to make it fit an advisory business. At the same time, with NexJ’s decades of experience working with some of the industry’s largest firms, we can offer an unmatched level of service and tailoring to your firm’s unique situation.
From onboarding to distribution and every stage in between,NexJ is designed to support seamless lifecycle management for advisory firms Learn more about how our AI can help you and then contact us for a demonstration.
