Legacy Bridge Achieves 30% Client Portal Engagement Increase
Executive Summary
Legacy Bridge Advisors, a rapidly growing RIA managing over $500 million in assets, faced a common challenge: low client engagement with their existing online portal. This limited effective communication, strained advisor time, and prevented clients from fully leveraging available financial planning tools. By redesigning their client portal with an emphasis on intuitive navigation, personalized dashboards, and consistent delivery of relevant financial insights, Legacy Bridge successfully increased client portal engagement by 30%, streamlined operations, and enhanced client satisfaction.
The Challenge
Legacy Bridge Advisors experienced significant growth in recent years, expanding their client base by 20% year-over-year. While this growth was positive, it also revealed inefficiencies in their existing client communication and information delivery processes. Their client portal, built on a legacy system with limited functionality, was underutilized. Only 25% of clients actively used the portal to access statements, review performance, or engage with financial planning resources. This low adoption rate resulted in several critical challenges:
- Increased Phone Calls and Emails: Clients frequently contacted advisors directly for information that was already available in the portal, overwhelming the advisory team with repetitive requests. On average, advisors spent 15 hours per week responding to basic inquiries regarding account balances, transaction history, and quarterly performance reports. This translates to approximately $3,000 per week in lost productivity (assuming an average advisor hourly rate of $200).
- Limited Use of Financial Planning Tools: The portal's poor user experience hindered clients from leveraging valuable financial planning tools, such as retirement calculators and goal-setting modules integrated through RightCapital. Only 10% of clients actively used these tools, preventing them from gaining a deeper understanding of their financial situation and limiting opportunities for advisors to proactively address potential issues. For instance, clients weren't using the tools to project the impact of potential tax changes on their long-term financial plans, leading to reactive rather than proactive planning.
- Difficulty Delivering Personalized Insights: The existing portal lacked the ability to deliver personalized content based on individual client needs and goals. Generic market updates and performance reports failed to resonate with clients, resulting in disengagement and a perception that the portal offered limited value. For a client nearing retirement with a conservative investment portfolio, generic communications about high-growth tech stocks were irrelevant and unhelpful. This lack of personalization contributed to a client churn rate of approximately 5% annually, costing the firm approximately $25,000 per year in lost revenue (assuming an average client revenue of $5,000 per year).
- Inefficient Reporting: Generating custom performance reports for client meetings was a time-consuming process, requiring advisors to manually compile data from multiple systems. The average time to prepare a comprehensive client report was 2 hours, further reducing available time for strategic planning and client relationship management.
In essence, Legacy Bridge's outdated client portal was creating a bottleneck in their operations, hindering efficient communication, limiting client engagement, and preventing advisors from fully leveraging available technology. They recognized the need for a modern, user-friendly portal that would empower clients with data and insights, ultimately freeing up advisor time for more strategic activities.
The Approach
To address these challenges, Legacy Bridge Advisors embarked on a comprehensive client portal redesign project, guided by the following key principles:
- Prioritize User Experience (UX): The primary goal was to create an intuitive and user-friendly portal that clients would actually enjoy using. This involved conducting user research, gathering feedback on the existing portal, and developing wireframes and prototypes for the new design. They employed A/B testing to optimize the user interface and ensure ease of navigation.
- Personalize Content Delivery: The firm recognized the importance of delivering relevant and engaging content based on individual client needs and goals. They implemented a system for segmenting clients based on factors such as age, risk tolerance, financial goals, and account holdings. This allowed them to tailor content, reports, and alerts to each client's specific circumstances. For example, clients nearing retirement received targeted information on retirement planning strategies, while younger clients with long-term investment horizons received content focused on growth opportunities.
- Integrate Key Financial Planning Tools: To encourage greater utilization of financial planning resources, Legacy Bridge integrated RightCapital directly into the new client portal. This allowed clients to seamlessly access retirement calculators, goal-setting modules, and other planning tools without having to navigate to a separate platform. They also created instructional videos and tutorials to help clients understand how to use these tools effectively.
- Proactive Communication and Education: To drive adoption of the new portal, Legacy Bridge implemented a comprehensive communication and education plan. This included sending targeted email campaigns to clients highlighting the benefits of the portal, hosting webinars and online tutorials demonstrating its features, and providing ongoing support and assistance to clients who needed help getting started.
- Data-Driven Optimization: Legacy Bridge understood the importance of continuously monitoring portal usage and gathering feedback to identify areas for improvement. They implemented analytics tracking to monitor key metrics such as login frequency, page views, and feature usage. This data was used to inform ongoing optimization efforts and ensure that the portal remained relevant and engaging for clients. For example, if a particular feature was underutilized, they would investigate the reasons why and make adjustments to improve its visibility and usability.
Legacy Bridge chose to migrate to Orion Advisor Tech for its robustness and ability to handle complex integrations. Orion provided the foundational technology, which the firm customized to fit its specific brand and workflow requirements.
Technical Implementation
The redesign of Legacy Bridge's client portal involved a significant technical undertaking. The key components of the implementation included:
- Orion Advisor Tech Implementation: Legacy Bridge migrated its client portal to Orion Advisor Tech, leveraging its robust reporting capabilities and API integrations. The firm selected Orion for its ability to handle complex data feeds and its commitment to ongoing development and innovation. The migration involved transferring all client data, configuring user access controls, and customizing the portal's branding and appearance. They used Orion Connect to facilitate integration with other platforms.
- RightCapital Integration: To enhance financial planning capabilities, Legacy Bridge seamlessly integrated RightCapital into the Orion-powered client portal. This integration allowed clients to access their financial plans, run retirement projections, and track progress towards their goals directly within the portal. The integration was achieved through RightCapital's API, which enabled real-time data synchronization between the two platforms. Data mappings were crucial to ensure accurate and consistent information flow, including data fields like assets under management, income, expenses, and investment allocations.
- Personalized Dashboard Development: Legacy Bridge designed personalized dashboards for each client based on their individual needs and goals. These dashboards provided a snapshot of key financial metrics, such as net worth, investment performance, and progress towards retirement. The dashboards were customized using Orion's reporting engine, which allowed advisors to create tailored reports and visualizations.
- Automated Email Marketing: To drive portal adoption and engagement, Legacy Bridge implemented an automated email marketing system. This system was used to send targeted emails to clients based on their demographics, account holdings, and portal usage. Emails included personalized market updates, investment recommendations, and reminders to review their financial plans. They used Mailchimp integrated with Orion via Zapier to create automated workflows.
- Analytics Tracking: Legacy Bridge implemented Google Analytics to track portal usage and identify areas for improvement. They monitored key metrics such as login frequency, page views, time spent on site, and feature usage. This data was used to inform ongoing optimization efforts and ensure that the portal remained relevant and engaging for clients. They set up specific event tracking to monitor engagement with RightCapital integration, identifying drop-off points in the user experience.
- Security Measures: Ensuring the security of client data was paramount. Legacy Bridge implemented multi-factor authentication, encryption protocols, and regular security audits to protect against unauthorized access.
The integration process involved creating secure API connections, mapping data fields between systems, and developing custom code to ensure seamless data flow. Calculations within the portal included standard financial metrics such as time-weighted return (TWR), internal rate of return (IRR), and Sharpe ratio, all calculated using industry-standard formulas within Orion's reporting engine. The firm also implemented anomaly detection algorithms to identify potential security breaches or data errors.
Results & ROI
The redesign of Legacy Bridge's client portal yielded significant positive results:
- Client Portal Engagement Increase: Client portal engagement increased by 30% within the first six months of the redesign. This was measured by the number of unique logins, page views, and time spent on the portal.
- Reduction in Phone Calls: The number of phone calls to advisors decreased by 15%, freeing up their time for more strategic planning and client relationship management. This reduction translated to an estimated savings of $45,000 per year in advisor time.
- Increased Utilization of Financial Planning Tools: The percentage of clients actively using financial planning tools increased from 10% to 35%. This allowed clients to gain a deeper understanding of their financial situation and make more informed decisions.
- Improved Client Satisfaction: Client satisfaction scores increased by 10%, as measured by post-implementation surveys. Clients reported that the new portal was more user-friendly, informative, and engaging.
- Reduction in Client Churn: The client churn rate decreased from 5% to 3%, resulting in an estimated revenue savings of $10,000 per year.
- Time Savings on Reporting: The average time to prepare a comprehensive client report decreased from 2 hours to 30 minutes, freeing up advisors to focus on other activities.
Specifically, the increased portal engagement led to a demonstrable increase in assets under management (AUM) among existing clients. Clients who actively engaged with the portal were 12% more likely to consolidate additional assets with Legacy Bridge, resulting in an additional $15 million in AUM within the first year. The improved client satisfaction scores also contributed to a 25% increase in client referrals.
Key Takeaways
Based on Legacy Bridge's experience, other RIAs can benefit from the following key takeaways:
- Prioritize User Experience: Invest in creating an intuitive and user-friendly client portal that clients will actually enjoy using. Conduct user research, gather feedback, and iterate on the design based on user needs.
- Personalize Content Delivery: Deliver relevant and engaging content based on individual client needs and goals. Segment clients based on demographics, risk tolerance, and financial goals, and tailor content accordingly.
- Integrate Key Financial Planning Tools: Seamlessly integrate financial planning tools into the client portal to encourage greater utilization. Provide instructional videos and tutorials to help clients understand how to use these tools effectively.
- Proactively Communicate and Educate: Implement a comprehensive communication and education plan to drive portal adoption and engagement. Highlight the benefits of the portal, host webinars and online tutorials, and provide ongoing support and assistance.
- Track and Measure Results: Continuously monitor portal usage and gather feedback to identify areas for improvement. Use data to inform ongoing optimization efforts and ensure that the portal remains relevant and engaging for clients.
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