Since 1983, Charles Stephen, a financial advisory firm based in Albuquerque, New Mexico, has abided by the social practice of knowing each client on a first name basis. This personal relationship philosophy has allowed them to help clients plan for the future through highly personalized and tailored financial plans. It’s also earned the firm a committed client base with lasting relationships over many years.
Adam Ciepiela is a Vice President and Partner at the Charles Stephen firm that his father started 36 years ago. In addition to highly personalized service, Adam credits the firm’s success to growing with the times and focusing on helping people cut through the noise of financial information in the era of the internet. “We help our clients understand that information is not knowledge,” he says, “It’s great to be on their team as we help them on their financial paths.”
The tech-forward advisory firm also attributes their staying power in the wealth management industry to their amazing staff and their cohesion as a team. Adam uses collaborative CRM technology like Wealthbox to create a link among the team of 12 users in Wealthbox, some of whom work on a remote basis. Says Adam: “We have a great staff who love working at our firm. But life happens and sometimes people need to relocate. Wealthbox, as a web-based collaboration tool, makes it so we don’t have to lose good employees when this happens.”
Favorite Features of Wealthbox
The Charles Stephen firm made the change from a competing CRM software to Wealthbox after getting a demo where he saw how powerful and easy Wealthbox was to use. Today, Wealthbox is the central hub for the firm, the go-to source for client information and team collaboration. Susan Gundrum, Director of Special Projects at Charles Stephen, says “Wealthbox is like the company’s bible!”
Here are some comments from the 12 Wealthbox users at Charles Stephen on some of their favorite features…
The Activity Stream
“It’s so helpful to log into Wealthbox and see what’s going on with our team of twelve Wealthbox users. It’s like a private social network combined with CRM, and it lets us easily stay on top of things all from one place in Wealthbox.”
Workflows
“We love the intuitive workflows in Wealthbox to streamline our new client processes. It makes us feel more like a team to as we get work done together, with ease.”
Opportunities
“We use the Opportunities feature in Wealthbox for new client acquisitions and we use the Projects section for onboarding these new clients. It’s all so seamless.”
The Wealthbox Calendar
“The interface of the Wealthbox calendar makes it super efficient to add events and link them to contacts. The slide-out panels in the interface are slick, too.”
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