TMCnews Featured Article

The world of customer relationship management (CRM) has seen a lot of change in the past few years -- it has moved on-premises to cloud, integrated with workforce management and other office software, and has seen a lot of newcomers enter the field. One company, Wealthbox, is trying to further innovate in the field with the addition of instant messaging.

Wealthbox recently announced that it will add Slack to its CRM. This will immediately give its thousands of users access to an internal chat system for both team connections and notifications of CRM updates. The company stated in its announcement that it is among the first – in addition to Orion Advisor Services CRM and AppCrown CRM – to offer this type of connection and that financial businesses such as registered investment advisors and broker-dealer firms are prime targets for this type of system.

Representatives of both Orion and AppCrown made mention that chat allows users to have a real-time dialogue and that it can be great for efficiency. However, there may be a fear in the market that companies cannot save instant message-based conversation details in the same way they can save emails. This leads to continued use of email. But Slack can remedy the situation.

Slack can save team conversations for later review. It acts as a group chat system so everyone can be a part of every conversation. Alternate channels in the Slack dashboard can mark different areas of conversation, and teams can get their own channels to capture that focus. In their channels, users can also receive Wealthbox CRM notifications related to a new contract, office tasks, calendar event, or when alerts come due.

Wealthbox will release the addition of Slack for no extra cost for basic users. An additional Standard, Plus, or Enterprise version can cater to businesses with greater needs.

Collaboration and context are two key components customer service software must deliver. For instance, TeamSupport's new Customer Insights feature enhances its customer service software by pulling customer information from publicly accesible databases, such as LinkedIn (News - Alert) and business websites to offer a complete view of the customer. Both TeamSupport and Wealthbox can give employees a better picture of their contacts and allow them to more easily interact with customers. This innovation should keep them one step ahead of customers who now demand, and definitely can receive, a top-tier experience thanks to powerful underlying software.