In 2020, we’re seeing a new engagement model emerge in financial services to support human connections in a remote-first environment. Driving business outcomes from the home office on personal devices has become a requirement, and therefore compliance for BYOD and new digital channels is a challenge that must be addressed now. Both Hearsay and Salesforce are focused on driving this transformation, and today we announced an expanded partnership to help financial services firms bring new capabilities to their field organizations. Read the press release here.

Investor Uncertainty

Individual investors, as they navigate the uncertainty and in some cases upheaval of their lives, are rightly feeling vulnerable and have substantial concerns over their financial futures. This may result in new risk curves for some, more price sensitivity for others, and across the board a desire for consistency and transparency to provide (at least a feeling of) control.  When the world is volatile and unpredictable, decisions are harder and more complex, so more in-depth advice is desired.

This reset of reality is also prompting many to rethink their long term plans – how they want to spend the rest of their lives, their priorities and goals, and what they feel is truly essential. With both more time and more concern to rethink their financial position, they may want to simplify their finances, change their risk profile, or realign with changing personal or philanthropic goals.

This represents both risks and opportunities for financial advisors. People who never thought about life insurance may now work with the first person who takes the time to explain their options. Auto insurance customers may become more price-sensitive and decide to move away from a long-time agent. Investors may simplify their financial plan and consolidate from several firms to a single advisor and bank. Some investors may need reassurance to stay the course, while others may need more compelling evidence to change their position.

One common need across these risks and opportunities is more immediate and proactive communications between financial advisors and clients. This means faster responses, more frequent one-to-one communications, and deeper dialogs. There is opportunity to take advantage of a more captive, focused audience, and engage with clients who rarely respond or want engagement.

Advisor Needs

Advisors who rely on community events to make new contacts and face-to-face meetings to develop prospect relationships have seen their marketing playbooks go up in smoke overnight. With regular channels of communications not available, they must adopt new digital channels that give clients choice and are just as easy, if not easier, to use. In some cases, their strongest benefit may be unavailable (e.g., their convenient branch location), creating the need for a business model adaptation as well.

At the same time as they are facing these challenges, they also face a huge opportunity to be there for clients when it matters most. There is a strong opening to discuss new goals and plans, building new levels of trust and connection. To make the most of this situation, personal relationships between clients and advisors need to become more digital, and digital needs to become more human.

Although extra support from corporate is clearly needed, digital messages alone without a human touch can be tone deaf. With the large amount of reassessment and planning happening at this moment, human advisors are needed more than ever, but without digital support, they cannot scale to meet the demand.

Hearsay + Salesforce

Given this environment, advisors and agents are being far more proactive with their customers and prospects. As a result, Hearsay has seen a 300% spike in activity in our compliant channels. We are also starting to see the financial services industry strike a better balance between automation and authentic engagement. At Hearsay, we focus on providing that critical last-mile of customer engagement, and more than ever our clients are focused on connecting those activities back into Salesforce to inform the next step in a personalized client journey.

This is the foundation of the Hearsay-Salesforce partnership. The ability to capture activities including texts, call records, social media and website interactions back into Salesforce records is transformational for our joint clients. When we connect these last mile channels to Salesforce we’ve seen a 15x increase in the amount of data flowing into CRM. This provides new insights for our customers.

The other very exciting aspect of the partnership is our ability to leverage Hearsay’s compliance platform, including the automation and intelligence that allows last-mile programs to scale up for field deployments into the tens of thousands. The platform captures and supervises activity across digital channels to comply with global regulations for financial services including requirements from FINRA, SEC, IIROC, FCA, and PRA. Using an AI-powered alert system, Hearsay’s platform intelligently surfaces, tracks and remediates sensitive communications so that supervisors can focus on the highest-risk violations and be more efficient.

All in all, we are excited to address some of the biggest challenges in financial services CRM – namely regulatory compliance and adoption of CRM in the field. Our partnership brings together a complete customer experience across automated and last-mile, one-to-one channels. There’s more to come in the next few quarters, and we look forward to sharing more innovations this year at Dreamforce!