How Top BDs Use Tech to Drive Advisor Success

Lon Dolber, American Portfolios: It's interesting, because if you look at an interview [Amazon's Jeff] ]Bezos did in 1999. Back then, there were people questioning their model, because they had gone beyond selling books. Bezos didn't want to talk about the technology at all. He only wanted to talk about one thing: the customer experience. This is the bottom line — the service to the customer and the customer experience.

Stringer: The technology drove the client experience.

Dolber: That tells me if we can hang on, maybe we don't have to win on technology. We have to believe that we can win on service and customer experience, which has a lot to do with when they pick up the phone and call you. How quickly do you pick up the phone? Do you really know the customer? Will you go to the ends of the [earth ] when they have a problem?

Webber: Amazon is a good example of how technology did drive [change], because customers demanded a more technological, digital way of doing business.

But that intimacy and the customization that everyone in this room has worked so hard to deliver, regardless of whether that's picking up the phone or offering some sort of electronic portal — depending on the demands that are coming in from your clients, that is going to be a win, I believe. This is why many firms no longer exist; they were trying to put everything into one box and make it look one way.

Stringer: Sometimes firms are hiding behind their technology. One of our fundamental behaviors is that we have in our firm's practice the human touch, which is really a key component to the advisor and client experience.

Dolber: I agree with you. If I look at our service center, there are people answering the phones, but the technology we use is Salesforce to get the metrics; that technology is not visible to the customer, but it's the way we analyze root causes of issues. If I'm not looking at why they're calling and categorizing it, I can't fix anything. But overall, our business is about people. We pick up the phone, answer the phone and talk to our customers.

Stringer: We call it service recovery, when we look at a service issue. How quickly can you recover? Because you can actually turn those things into a gift and turn them into a positive — if you recover well. That's a process we work on, because people make mistakes; it just happens. You can work on how you fix it. How do you make it better so that there's a better client experience?

Webber: Our goal is to use automation even to the extent of machine learning to do the day-to-day easy stuff. But humans still have to be involved and engaged on the sophisticated side for trying to bridge gaps.

We're [also] building sophistication in our service model and are working to make sure that it's running in a more automated fashion; our clients, our advisors and their investors are demanding that access, and a lot of that service access is on their phones today. It's mobile.

We'll actually allow the investors, if the advisor enables it, to literally open the account. Now, not one advisor has come forward yet and figured out that they want to use that as a prospecting tool. Most advisors … would like to meet someone before opening an account. So, it's got to have those bumper bars in place.

Ralph DeVito, The Investment Center: As for technology, we're called a fast follower. We're more focused on the client — my client being advisor. We're going to make mistakes on basic processing at times, but we apologize. For us, it's been focused on getting out to the advisor and finding out where they want to go, what are they looking to do and how are they running their practice?

We help with our advisor marketing and practice-management program. We've had tremendous success with that, where our advisors are growing like crazy. It's really a coaching program, but it teaches some tech and marketing. You then add a virtual assistant.