Until recently, wealth advisors as a whole had a reputation for working alone. But this solitary business model is changing — and with good reason. Working in teams improves efficiency for wealth advisors, which explains why some of the most successful financial advisors these days are part of a team. It’s an approach that advisors in all channels have embraced.  

Teams tend to be more productive than solo operations, both in terms of operating efficiencies and revenue generation. And when a firm reaches a certain level of assets and revenue, it’s important for advisors to decide what roles everyone should have.  

There are many ways to structure teams in Financial Services Cloud to manage clients and client activities. As an example, one of our consultants at ShellBlack was working with a wealth management firm that divides its advisors into two teams. Each team has four advisors — one primary, one secondary, and two backups. There is a customer service queue as well as an investor queue. This firm has a highly structured business process that has many tasks, each of which is assigned to a queue with a Process Builder. This isn’t a problem when tasks can be assigned to a person or a queue. But when there are two queues of advisors and only one group needs to be assigned the task, depending on the account, that’s a little different. 

To address this special case, the consultant added fields to the User record for Queue Member. This picklist is selected from when the user is added. An automation then adds the Queue String ID to the user record based on that picklist value. This helps the part-time administrator that doesn’t have to remember how to find that Queue String ID  when they hire someone new. Now, when the Process Builder needs to assign tasks for an event on an account, it finds the owner of the account. On the owner’s user record, it finds the Queue String ID that the advisor belongs to, and assigns the task.

The consultant also used a free app from the AppExchange called Automated Group Manager to put a new user in a queue or group  automatically. When a new user is added and the queue is selected from the picklist, that person is automatically put into that group without the added step of going to the queue to add a new member. If a user is assigned a different queue it changes them automatically too.  

This app can help reduce administrative overhead for any company that does frequent hiring. As new users are added, they are automatically assigned to a queue based on their profile. They can then see all the cases assigned to the queue. Maybe every new hire needs to be put in a public group to see marketing materials; this would be automatic. It would also help a firm that doesn’t have a dedicated administrator and/or relies on a team member with limited knowledge of assigning people to groups or queues. For each new employee, a new user record is entered. From there, based on a picklist selection, the new team member is automatically added to the appropriate queue or group. All the code is written in this app, you only need to build the Process Builder to use it.

This app by GearsDesign can make an administrator’s life easier by helping set rules to automatically manage Public Groups, Chatter Groups, and Community Groups membership automatically. This will work for the addition or removal of group members.  

Another automation that our consultants have done for teams is to automatically add them to the Account Team Tab/Related List.  A Process Builder will add them so they are easy to find.

Working in teams in a wealth management firm can be profitable, more enjoyable, and easy to manage with some automation in Financial Services Cloud.  Let ShellBlack help automate your teams!

Author Credit:

Lisa Kilmer CFP© Salesforce Consultant at ShellBlack.com

Content Contributed by:

Alysia Millwee Salesforce Consultant at ShellBlack.com