Connecting with clients in new, digital ways to maintain strong relationships

The one thing we’ve consistently heard from you this year is that you want and need more ways to connect with your clients. In this strange era of social distancing, the age-old options of in-person meetings or client events are largely off the table, and phone calls don’t provide the same level of connection. The answer these days has been digital connection points. 

So as a firm, we shifted our focus in March to developing, purchasing, or integrating digital solutions to help you further connect with your clients. Our goal is to build a diverse menu of options, so you can pick and choose that best fit you and your clients. We bundled together these client-connection tools in our Thrivalist suite—resources you can use to thrive in today’s digital environment—to make it easier for you to find, understand, and use them.

Account View

What’s the one digital tool every company seems to have these days? An app. Clients are used to accessing everything from food delivery options to hotel bookings via apps, and financial information is no exception. With that in mind, we’re creating a new Account View experience that offers a mobile app, while continuing to evolve the investor portal experience your clients may already be familiar with today.

You can first personalize your clients’ view of the new interface with your branding and logo, and then offer access so their account information is at their fingertips. Plus, you have the option to add any goals you establish for your clients using the Client Goals tool, enabling them to focus on specific goals relevant to them, instead of market changes.

The new Account View mobile app and portal are key to a future, compelling client experience and provide another source of connection you can make with your clients today. Both are available to you for free today and will continue to receive enhancements in 2021 and beyond.

MyRepChat

Texting is commonplace for most of us these days, but less so in the financial industry because of the thorny compliance issues involved. However, you told us that texting was vital to connecting with your clients, especially in the current environment. So to enable you to text your clients compliantly and without sacrificing privacy, we partnered with MyRepChat.

Available to you for no extra cost, MyRepChat enables you to download a texting app, which means only texts sent to and from the app are recorded for compliance purposes. At the same time, your clients can text with you from their native texting tool within their phone without having to download an app themselves.

Advisors using the app have told us it’s freed them up to quickly and easily communicate with clients from wherever they happen to be, whether in their home office, on the road, or supervising kids doing online schooling.

ScheduleOnce

ScheduleOnce is a smart appointment booking solution that integrates with your Outlook or other calendar tool and makes it easy for your clients to schedule meetings with you. Rather than having to deal with time-consuming back-and-forth calls or emails to set up a meeting, you can simply provide your clients a link that lists openings in your schedule, and they can select the time that works best for them. If they want to reschedule, they simply revisit the link and update the meeting time.

Plus, the tool integrates with video conferencing applications and automatically generates email invitations with conference call-in details.

You can even share your ScheduleOnce link on your website, so clients—or more importantly, prospects—are empowered to schedule meetings with you when they want, making you more accessible to them.

When you set up your ScheduleOnce link, you can have schedulers select if they are a prospective client, existing client, product wholesaler, or LPL home office staff—helping you plan. Once they select who they are, you could then filter what type of meetings you want to offer. Prospective clients could have the option for 30- or 60-minute meetings, whereas product wholesalers could select from 15-minute timeslots, for example.

To enable you to use the tool, we contracted with ScheduleOnce to design a compliant solution specifically tailored for LPL Advisors, and available to you for a discounted rate.

A client-first focus

This ongoing focus on client connections, and the client experience in general, is something you’ll continue to see from us next year. You’ve let us know just how important client tools and capabilities are to you, so whenever we look to create, purchase, or integrate new technology, we’ll ensure a stellar client experience comes first.

For now, as we go into the holiday season, consider ways you can use these tools to reconnect with your clients as they plan for the new year. All of us, your clients included, are certainly looking forward to 2021, and you can play a key role in guiding their important financial decisions they’re sure to make next year.

Next in our series

We continue our reflection on all the positive aspects of 2020 next week, when we’ll discuss how we’re working to transform your service experience, so it’s easier for you to serve your clients in less time than ever before.

If you’re looking for new ways to connect with your clients, LPL advisors can check out the Thrivalist section of the Resource Center, where you’ll find information on these tools and others, as well as client-approved content. Plus, you can look through our Thrivalist blog, which houses tips and tricks on how to use each of these tools.

The views and opinions expressed by the LPL Financial Advisor(s) may not be representative of the views of other Financial Advisors and are not indicative of future performance or success.