It’s 3:45 a.m. and my alarm is screaming at me to wake up. I reach for my phone to stop the blasphemous racket. By instinct, I manage to shut it off but the noise keeps blaring. I realize that I had set the alarm on my tablet as well. Good thing too, because that's the alarm that brought me to my senses. As someone predisposed to staying up late rather than waking early, the hour is more familiar for being the end of a day than the start of one.

In my recent blog, Customer-Centric Digital Transformation, I discussed the strategy for ensuring the customer is at the center of digital transformation. Today, I’d like to discuss one particular channel, the Contact Center. 

The financial services industry in Europe is undergoing massive regulatory change of late, perhaps more so than anywhere in the world. They’re not alone in feeling regulatory pressure, of course. Firms around the globe have been dealing with the impact of the last decade’s economic recession and financial crises, in the form of complicated, overlapping, and ever-changing regulations.

I'm not a developer. I don't work with code, and though I use computers every day, I don't understand what's running in the background. But that's okay, because I'm a writer instead. So I spend a lot of time asking developers about their process and trying to understand how they do what they do and why. Fortunately for me, they tend to be very patient people.

In any industry, like financial services, that relies on maintaining deep relationships with their clients, it’s critical to understand and service the client across their entire journey. Successful client experience solutions focus on features across what we call the “The Customer Lifecycle.” 

For me, wealth management is more than just a target vertical that we serve at NexJ. It’s also my personal area of interest– not just from a fintech perspective, but also from a business and industry perspective. As part of that interest, I keep my own wealth advice training up-to-date with the Canadian Securities Institute (CSI). 

Wikipedia defines Master Data Management as "the processes, governance, policies, standards and tools that consistently define and manage the critical data of an organization to provide a single point of reference".  Customer data is at the heart of every organization and is the most complicated data reference to master.

For some, it’s about reducing costs by modernizing the back office.  For others, it’s about leveraging disruptors within their enterprise.  For NexJ, it’s all about the customer.In the age of the customer, the customer is in control of their journey.  They dictate how and when they will interact with the firm.  

On October 10, 2014 at NexJ’s client day, Julie Ask (@JulieAsk), Forrester Research analyst and co-author of The Mobile Mind Shift, spoke to our customers about the behavior changes occurring as a result of the adoption of smartphones and apps. 

Next week, I'll be flying to London, England, for the Customer Experience Exchange for Financial Services. The Exchange is a meeting of senior executives responsible for the design, development, and delivery of customer service strategies and solutions. Bringing together a range of exclusive experts from the Financial Services industry, this conference provides valuable information on current and future trends in customer experience.

Even today, a key attraction for talented advisors (and more importantly their books of business) is offering a fully Integrated Advisor Desktop (IAD) platform. The big warehouses and the successful Investment Banking Divisions (IBD) know that integrating custodians/account management, portfolio management, order entry and management, financial planning, research, and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) are table-stakes these days. 

Today, we’re going to take a quick look at scheduling, a fundamental feature of a financial services CRM solution. It’s a necessity, however, many companies only give a few cursory questions about it in most RFPs we see. It’s a mistake to assume that all scheduling is alike.