What is Xplan?
The Xplan platform is the backbone system for financial advice firms and insurance brokers. It has a comprehensive range of modules including compliance, advice, communications and customer management. For more information on their module offering, we suggest you check out their website.
A stack of benefits
Businesses don’t need to sign up to all of the Xplan modules. Xplan provides the flexibility for companies to only subscribe to the modules they want, allowing them to customise the platform to their needs. Xplan is both flexible and scalable, and can be configured to replicate most business processes. Due to its adaptability, we’ve seen it work for a range of companies, from large enterprises to businesses with five employees.
Limitations – and how to get around them
Xplan offers purpose built, best-in-class, financial advice functions, such as compliance. However, some of the “bonus” modules, like marketing and customer management, need improvement. For this reason, we recommend businesses integrate Xplan with other best-of-breed tools, such as Salesforce for a CRM, so they can work together seamlessly.
Integrating Xplan with other platforms has been a challenge in the past. But no more! We’re pretty chuffed to announce that Fluent Group has managed to crack Xplan integrations (more details below).
Advice before implementing Xplan
Our advice before implementing Xplan (or any platform) is to articulate what you want the platform to deliver before you make the investment. It’s important that decision makers in your organisation understand the pain points, associated risks and costs that exist in the current operating mode, and if and how Xplan can address these. This is foundational to build a compelling business case to secure your Xplan investment.
The next step is ensuring your business processes are established. Platforms like Xplan are complicated to configure, but getting it right is crucial to maximise your investment. We spend time up front with our clients to help define their processes so that Xplan can be seamlessly configured to follow them. While future small changes that optimise and improve operations are fine, huge transformation changes are complex and costly.
Xplan without integrations
Integrating Xplan with other systems has previously been a sticking point. This inability to integrate has meant that customer information has been dispersed across many systems which requires duplicate input of data, or that businesses are relying on Xplan for purposes that it isn’t set-up to support.
Say there is a business, let’s call them McBain & Co., that helps clients with their mortgages, taxes and financial advice. They use Xero for taxes, Xplan for advice and they partner with AFG for mortgage broking. Painfully, none of these systems talk to each other – this last part isn’t hypothetical.
Without integrations, McBain & Co. has been struggling to provide a comprehensive service to their customers. One of their advisors awkwardly suggested a customer invests in another managed fund without knowing that they’re already struggling to pay-off their existing mortgage. Another client told Henry in taxes that they’ve moved to a new address, but Henry only made the update in Xero, so Charlotte in mortgages sent important documents to the client’s old address. This lack of consistency doesn’t present a professional image for McBain & Co., and creates a plethora of unnecessary extra work for the team.
We cracked the code!
We’re happy to announce that we have figured out how to integrate Xplan with Salesforce. Through this integration, we can now consolidate customer data from Xplan and other systems into Salesforce to deliver a single, 360-degree view of customers.
Xplan integration benefits xplained
The Xplan-Salesforce integration delivers a lot of benefits. Here are some of the big ones:
Best-of-breed tools to drive scale
Without this integration, businesses previously stretched a single system to insufficiently perform multiple functions, or they compromised data efficiencies by adopting multiple siloed best-of-breed tools for the operational benefits. With the Xplan-Salesforce integration now possible, financial advice businesses no longer need to make this trade-off.
Salesforce is a powerful tool that allows businesses to scale successfully. Financial advice businesses that were previously relying on Xplan for customer management and communications will quickly experience its benefits. They can scale their customer base, running sophisticated campaigns that convert prospects into customers while optimising cost. They can also improve customer retention and engagement through automated communications reminding customers to re-weight their portfolio or review their insurance.
Exceptional outcomes and experience for customers
Creating a single, 360-degree customer view in Salesforce enables companies to deliver far better customer outcomes. Before integration, customer data may have previously been spread across multiple systems, making it difficult for companies to consider all available data when providing advice to customers. Providing a consolidated view of customer information enables businesses to provide holistic advice that considers multiple data points, which undoubtedly lead to better financial outcomes for customers.
Consolidating CRM, sales and marketing data within Salesforce also allows businesses to streamline customer communications. For example, rather than receiving communications from different systems that each have slightly different formatting, all comms can be generated out of Salesforce, with the same template providing a consistent look and feel. While it might not sound like much, these details impact a client’s perception of a business’ professionalism. This is particularly important for financial advice – after all, customers want their experience to be pretty buttoned up when it comes to their money.
Deliver efficiencies
We’ve seen integrations deliver huge efficiencies for clients, allowing them to scale their business without increasing headcount. Efficiencies are gained from several angles, such as reducing time spent finding customer data or duplicating data across systems. Additionally, successful integrations with best-of-breed tools can deliver significant automation, freeing employees up to focus on high value tasks. These savings and benefits will more than justify the cost of Sales Cloud or Pardot to allow for Xplan integrations.
Contact us for more information on how we can help you maximise your Xplan investment with integrations.