Avier Wealth Advisors automates workflows with Conga Orchestrate

Avier Wealth Advisors is a boutique wealth management firm serving high-net-worth technology industry professionals. Headquartered in Bellevue, Washington with an additional office in Portland, Oregon, the Registered Investment Advisor reported more than $600M of assets under management in 2022. 
 

Challenge

Successful wealth managers help their clients identify what is most important to them and then set goals to make it an economic reality. To do so frequently requires collaboration with other professionals. The job is equal parts financial acumen and time-intensive client-facing counsel; it’s also a job with a never-ending series of tasks to ensure regulatory compliance, that the client portfolio is built with the client’s goals in mind, and that the advisor—client relationship remains mutually beneficial.

For example, there are multiple different tasks that need to take place when a client makes a simple distribution request. More complex tasks can require 13+ steps. If just one of those steps does not take place accurately and sequentially then the client-requested action could be delayed. Other common client actions with multiple, timely steps include Roth conversions, address or email changes, billing cycle updates, one-off trade instructions, account openings and closures, account contribution or distribution changes, and portfolio allocation adjustments.  

As a firm with more than 500 active clients, Avier’s advisory team must balance a large number of tasks to ensure their clients are well taken care of. The company faced three main challenges. First, keeping track of the tasks in a timely manner, allowing the team to spend more time on higher-value activities such as meeting with clients. Second, making sure tasks were completed efficiently, in a specific order, and in the exact same way every time. Finally, making sure tasks were created and distributed automatically, enhancing the firm’s ability to scale. 

Solution

Most investment advisory firms depend on a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform to track client data and interactions. Avier Advisors relies on Salesforce along with Conga Orchestrate, to streamline workflow automation. Conga’s open and flexible high-performance solution unifies, automates, and standardizes processes across all teams to maximize user efficiency within their CRM.  

Using Conga Orchestrate, the team at Avier Wealth Advisors created repeatable processes in Salesforce to manage complex workflows and processes. According to Lars Phillips, Partner and Lead Advisor, who has championed Avier’s use of the product for the last decade. “Wealth management is a business of details. The more tasks we automate, the fewer opportunities there are for things to fall through the cracks.”

As Avier Wealth Advisors continues to grow, there are more and more processes and therefore tasks to run. And as current processes are refined and new processes are defined within Conga Orchestrate, it has allowed the firm to scale the business. Avier’s workflows and processes run automatically once specific conditions are met within the client Salesforce record. Validation rules ensure compliance and upcoming tasks are tracked in the workflow to optimize and balance employee workload. Also valuable to Avier is Conga Orchestrate’s ability to route tasks to the correct person in the correct order, preventing employee bottlenecks and inadvertent process delays.  

As compliance, firm growth, or staffing necessitates change, processes can easily be adjusted without complex coding. The processes also reduce the need for staff training.

“We’re very busy,” says Phillips. “When we first started using Conga Orchestrate over a decade ago, it took us out of the ‘Paperclip and Post-it Note Era’. We can’t go back.” 

Results

Conga Orchestrate gives the Avier Wealth Advisors team peace of mind that its clients are receiving the best possible service because tasks are automated and don’t have the opportunity to fall through the cracks.

“This has become the lifeblood of our business,” says Phillips. Avier will run close to 5,000 tasks this year which translates to 5,000 tasks automatically delegated, tasks someone doesn’t have to fish out of their email and build into their daily workflow.

There is now a layer of redundancy because every process is automated, providing a series of checks and balances ensuring that all steps are completed in the right order.

Necessary auditing is made easier by Conga Orchestrate’s automated report generation. Anyone who works on the client has the ability check Conga Orchestrate at any time to see where a task is in process or, even better, receive a notification. “We don’t have to be hovering over it for an indeterminate amount of time,” says Phillips. “The value is obvious.” 

Business Outcomes

• Accelerates process completion by routing tasks to the correct person in the correct order
• Reduces number of errors made in transactions because there is a standardized process
• Provides better client service because rote tasks no longer fall through the cracks or are delayed
• Frees up advisors by reducing the time they spend following up on administrative client needs
• Reduces training times for new hires because process workflows are pre-defined