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October 08, 2020

Openwork innovates wealth management, improves customer relationships with Dynamics 365

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.

Openwork

“We use Dynamics 365 to build higher value relationships, create consistently positive customer experiences, and deliver the financial advice our customers need to realize their dreams.”

Mike Hewitt, Transformation Director, Openwork

Capture opportunities, transform lives 

As families grow, create livelihoods, buy homes, send kids off to college, and finance retirements, they have to build and manage the means to achieve their dreams. That’s why Openwork delivers personalized, well-qualified wealth management to help families capture opportunities, meet their goals, and transform their lives. 

Openwork is an appointed representative network that maintains franchise contracts with more than 650 financial advice firms in the United Kingdom. With £21 billion in assets under management and a 5.3 percent share of the United Kingdom mortgage market, Openwork must ensure that the more than 4,000 financial advisers in its network comply with relevant regulations, while they sustain close, high-value relationships with each of their customers. 

“Well-delivered wealth management can be critical to people’s long-term happiness and well-being,” says Mike Morrow, Wealth and Platform Director at Openwork. “Whether we deliver mortgage services on a first home, financial protection against the unforeseen, retirement planning, or holistic wealth management, we want our financial advisers to focus on helping customers improve their lives." 

Build a modern customer engagement platform 

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,” says Morrow. “We wanted to build a solution that provided a common foundation, greater transparency, seamless integration, and a better client journey.”

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.

Much more than customer relationship management (CRM)

Morrow’s team worked with Openwork development, IT, and business teams, and Xpedition—a Gold competency member of the Microsoft Partner Network—to build the Openwork Concert customer engagement platform on top of Dynamics 365 Customer Service and Dynamics 365 Sales. Openwork financial advisers use Concert and Dynamics 365 to stay connected with customers, increase efficiency, and help ensure 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.

“To help meet GDPR [General Data Protection Regulation] data-retention requirements, we use Dynamics 365 to automatically time-stamp files for compliant deletion,” says Mike Hewitt, Transformation Director at Openwork. “When the date approaches, the system alerts administrators with options to apply for extended retention or allow automated deletion.”

As Openwork moves forward with Dynamics 365, it will use the customer data it collects to help identify opportunities to deliver new products and services. It can use those insights to shape customer solutions and develop new propositions that it can introduce into its network and the wealth-management market.

Drive revenue, support growth, deliver more value 

With customer information from across its broad network centralized in a single, standardized Dynamics 365 environment, Openwork will increase data visibility for easier compliance, greater quality assurance, improved process efficiency, and operational resilience. Openwork financial advisers are already completing core processing tasks up to 60 percent faster. They’re removing technical and process barriers and using the time saved to build customer trust through authentic, personalized engagement.

“We’re using Dynamics 365 to drive end-to-end customer journeys that support quality and compliance through greater visibility,” says Hewitt. “Instead of using multiple solutions to serve one customer, our advisers now have a single tool to support all of their customers.” 

By using data to better understand customer need, advisers will generate new opportunities for new prospects and existing customers, while more personalized financial advice and better lead sharing will drive new revenue and support long-term growth at Openwork. Streamlining and automating many administrative tasks will help Openwork better manage risk and compliance. And eliminating silos across disciplines will help its advisers build a single, comprehensive view of every customer life cycle and deliver more thoughtful, thorough, and timely wealth management.

“We’re not a transactional business. We’re a relationship business,” says Hewitt. “We use Dynamics 365 to build higher value relationships, create consistently positive customer experiences, and deliver the financial advice our customers need to realize their dreams.”  

Find out more about Openwork on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn

“We’ve used Dynamics 365 to build much more than a CRM solution. 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.”

Craig Woodhouse, Technical Consultant, Openwork

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