Innovation is at the core of RBC Wealth Management-U.S., even shaping the financial solutions it provides its clients. That’s why the company chose Slack as a strategic platform to transform its Technology and Support groups.
The less time financial advisors have to spend swiveling between interfaces and processing back-end admin and paperwork, the more time they have to find new prospects and form deeper relationships with existing clients. With Slack, RBC Wealth Management’s teams are developing applications faster, improving their time to resolution and reducing tech failures overall. All of that adds up to efficiency gains, leaving employees free to focus on high-value work that drives the bottom line.
We caught up with Greg Beltzer, the head of technology for RBC Wealth Management-U.S., at Dreamforce 2023 to learn about how Slack has transformed the way he and his team do business—and what new features he’s most excited about.
Discovering efficiency gains at scale with Slack
The team at RBC Wealth Management had already made a significant investment in Salesforce’s Financial Services Cloud; it’s an engine that drives customer growth and loyalty. But they needed a productivity tool that could handle complex, time-sensitive issues—one that could easily plug into its existing Salesforce infrastructure and make better use of a broad spectrum of customer data with a suite of powerful automations.
“We have a lot of data. And we built a lot of automation into our Financial Services Cloud, so extending that into a non-Salesforce platform would be prohibitive,” says Beltzer.
“The easy connectivity Slack provides with FSC makes it easier for users to see and use the data where they are at.”
Slack was a good fit. Instead of having to pivot between multiple interfaces for separate tools, advisors can operate within a single dashboard that contains all the information and functionality they need to open and close cases from one place.
Before incorporating Slack, collaborating was a challenge. Associates relied on back-and-forth emails between multiple stakeholders, from the front office to the financial advisors in the trenches. But now they communicate in easily digestible, topic-focused channels that offer not only context but access to each other wherever—and whenever—they need it.
This is most evident in the way notifications and alerts work. Previously, the Operations team sent emails to advisors about time-sensitive events from trade executions and margin calls to account conversions and approvals. Now when such events occur, RBC Wealth Management’s advisors are alerted automatically through the Salesforce Notification Center app in Slack so they can take immediate action on critical client events.
Using Slack to turn prospects into clients
The team at RBC Wealth Management aims to weave Slack into every element of their sales operations. One of the key priorities for financial advisors is staying on top of the constant flow of leads and referrals and figuring out which ones are worth their time to pursue. This has historically been a challenge: they’d have to pivot between multiple interfaces and combine that data with sporadic insight from meetings and calls.
With Slack, however, they’ll now get direct access to a curated feed of Salesforce leads, directly in a channel. They can claim prospects with the click of a button and automatically update their CRM in the process—a huge time-saver compared to the old way of switching between tools.
From there, advisors can navigate to the dedicated Sales homepage in Slack, where they’ll see key metrics and important notifications. But crucially, they can actually modify their Salesforce data directly, without leaving Slack.
They’ll pull up the qualification notes they and their team have prepared in a canvas. This includes key factors they need to focus on when connecting with their prospect: a dedicated talk track, product demonstration videos, key use cases, buyer persona breakdowns, including typical profiles of decision-makers and end users, as well as competitive intelligence and insight to help them accurately position their product to the prospect. When the time comes to get on the phone, they can also add notes directly to the document, ensuring that all critical information is captured.
After a successful call with the prospect, the advisors are ready to convert them into a full-fledged client. In the past, handing leads over to the sales team was a time-consuming and complex process. But with Slack and Salesforce working seamlessly together, advisors can use the power of workflow automation to do this with a single click from inside the qualification canvas.
Next, it’s time for the wealth management sales lead to take over. This person is constantly on the go, meeting prospects and customers. Staying up to date with opportunities used to be cumbersome. But with Slack facilitating their sales motion, the sales lead will be able to connect from anywhere to Salesforce’s single source of truth. In addition to their KPIs, they can see all the context about the opportunity the financial advisor just converted. From there, it’s a layup to plan the sales motion and arrive at a successful close!
Looking ahead to Slack AI
Beltzer sees even more productivity gains on the horizon with Slack AI, an artificial-intelligence product that will launch early next year. In particular, three powerful new features promise to change the way teams get their work done:
- Channel recaps. Users can generate highlights on any channel, helping them cut straight to what’s most important. Imagine being able to instantly extract key investment criteria from a client account channel. With new insights quickly and easily accessible, teams can make informed, customer-centric decisions.
- Thread summaries. Users can catch up on any conversation in one click. For example, AI could simplify multiple pages of financial policies into a concise summary, making it easier for the advisory and support staff to stay in the loop and resolve issues efficiently, improving not only their understanding of the deal but also the time it takes to close.
- Intelligent search results. Users can ask a question and get a clear, concise answer based on relevant Slack messages. For example, when onboarding a financial advisor to a new account, search answers can help users quickly get a grasp on the client’s goal, investment history and more.
These AI capabilities will provide an easier way for RBC Wealth Management’s team of advisors to access and digest information, saving valuable time and helping them close deals even faster.
“For us, automation and AI will be the game changers,” Beltzer says. “That’s the magic goal,” Beltzer says, “to give our financial advisors more freedom to focus on the client since they no longer have to spend as much time on mundane tasks.”
