When consumers and families in the United Kingdom need qualified advice on how to build, keep, and manage wealth, they often turn to the Openwork network of financial advisers. The network manages £21 billion in assets, but like many financial institutions, the company struggled with multiple, disconnected customer service solutions and inefficient processes. With Microsoft Dynamics 365, Openwork built a cloud-based engagement platform to boost overall efficiency, drive revenue, reduce risk, and strengthen customer relationships with its advisers.
To help its financial advisers deliver consistently high-value services to customers, Openwork wanted comprehensive visibility across every customer experience from many different data sources. But with a legacy ecosystem of disconnected point solutions, each serving different business functions across hundreds of firms and thousands of financial advisers, Openwork struggled to give its advisers a single, 360-degree view of each customer journey.
Advisers had to engage customers through multiple interfaces that had limited interoperability, which duplicated tasks, created significant inefficiencies, delayed decisions, and made it difficult to evaluate interactions. It all cost time and money, degraded the customer experience, and obscured opportunities.
“We have a complex web of relationships that need to be well managed, but we were looking at each component through a separate lens. We wanted to build a solution that provided a common foundation, greater transparency, seamless integration, and a better client journey.”
“We’re using Dynamics 365 to drive end-to-end customer journeys that support quality and compliance through greater visibility. Instead of using multiple solutions to serve one customer, our advisers now have a single tool to support all of their customers.” Mike Hewitt: Transformation Director
Openwork needed to standardize and simplify processes, drive efficiencies, expose more data, and increase visibility and interoperability across its adviser network. After evaluating several different solutions, Openwork built a modern, completely customized, cloud-based customer engagement platform on Microsoft Dynamics 365. This helped the company streamline processes, increase revenue, reduce costs, enhance transparency, and manage regulatory compliance.
With historical, current, and real-time customer data at their fingertips in Dynamics 365 Sales, Openwork advisers achieve a single view of the customer life cycle across all products and across the entire network. This helps them better understand each customer’s story, goals, and capacity for risk, so that the advisers deliver appropriate, innovative, high-value services and products and maintain successful end-to-end customer journeys across every account.
“We’ve used Dynamics 365 to build much more than a CRM solution,” says Craig Woodhouse, Technical Consultant at Openwork. “We’ve created a centralized customer engagement platform and added easy customizations that give us the flexibility to link data sources, standardize processes, and interoperate efficiently across the more than 650 firms in our network.”
Openwork uses Dynamics 365 Customer Service to help advisers deliver personalized service through a 360-degree view of the customer. The company has deployed Dynamics 365 automation capabilities to populate reports, check data entry logic, validate fields, and streamline compliance, which saves time and money while reducing friction for the customer. By accessing all this information online, customers can hold fewer, shorter meetings and use their time more effectively elsewhere.
