A new program at Dynamic harkens back to what was once thought of as a service at the Ritz-Carlton and other luxury hotel brands: Concierge is a premium, personalized service for advisors that offloads the administrative work to Dynamic, providing an alternative solution to outsourcing a virtual assistant or hiring staff in your practice.

Thoughtfully designed to address the endless time-consuming administrative needs of growing advisory practices, Concierge provides the “extra mile” treatment; the Concierge desk is staffed by Dynamic team members, Heather Graham and Kelly McCarthy, with years of industry experience and training on performing client service and managing operational challenges, as well as deep knowledge of Dynamic’s systems and processes.

As with many Dynamic programs, Concierge was born out of conversations with advisors and Dynamic team members, according to Tanya Escobedo, director of Dynamic’s Advisor Onboarding team.

“Countless times, we’ve heard comments from advisors about how they don’t want to spend time in administrative details—finding and pre-filling forms, chasing down clients for signatures, remembering how to enter multiple types of service requests, creating client records… This list goes on,” said Escobedo, co-developer of the Concierge program with Eric Draughon, Advisor Support director, and Marisol Fung, Portfolio Services director.

“Yet, either they’ve not been successful in finding or hiring dependable, skilled staff, or they find hiring an employee undesirable given all the obligations and responsibilities of employers. Dynamic is in a perfect position to solve this problem.”

Dynamic Concierge provides the following services to advisors:

• Client and account setup and maintenance within Wealth360
• Document preparation and client follow up
• Service request and task creation
• Custodian account setup and maintenance
• Ongoing custodian liaison
• Account aggregation
• Client portal setup
• Salesforce and Orion reports, and data query creation and usage

Enhanced communication is a key feature between Concierge team members and the advisor and his or her team. This includes:

Weekly meetings: The Concierge team offers a weekly call to advisor clients to confirm priorities for the practice, review in-process items and discuss new requests.

Personalized Slack channel: Direct communication between an advisor and their designated Concierge team member via a personalized Slack channel to ensure expedient communication on status updates, follow ups and to initiate service requests.

Dedicated Concierge email address

Open Item Tracking Tool: Concierge team members use the tool on a daily basis to track and provide the current status of activities and outstanding items that need follow-up or attention.

According to Dynamic CEO Jim Cannon, the concept for Concierge as a premium service option for advisors “has gone from ‘Should we do this?’ to ‘We need to do this,’” in light of the various administrative and personnel challenges on advisors’ plates and as more practices have moved toward a virtual service model with their clients.

“Tanya, Eric and Marisol came up with the Concierge structure tailored for Dynamic affiliates, and we began to offer it last year as a more productive alternative to hiring, training and managing an employee or contract virtual assistant,” said Cannon.

Tom McCann, CFP® and Brian Bucell, CFP® of Crestview Capital Management in Agoura Hills, Calif., implemented the service in June. They have been Concierge customers ever since. For these business partners, their firm’s “technology-driven service model is a perfect fit for the Concierge service.”

McCann noted, “We service a lot of clients virtually right now either because they are not yet ready to meet due to Covid concerns or they are not local.

“We previously worked with a virtual assistant while we were working full-time out of our office pre-Covid, and quickly found this service model wasn’t a fit for us,” said McCann.

“We were having client meetings in the office frequently, printing and tagging pre-filled new client paperwork the assistant created for us and doing more administrative busy work than we would have liked.

The Concierge model does allow more customization in terms of services Heather provides such as scheduling client review meetings and calling both prospects and clients to follow-up on paperwork, which was a big plus.”

The standard Concierge service includes up to 30 hours of Concierge time for $2,500 per month. A 10-hour option is $1,200 per month, and Dynamic has plans to offer Concierge on a project basis.

The type and level of services continue to evolve as more advisors use Concierge and provide input on how Dynamic can better support their practices. For more information on what Dynamic Concierge can do to lift the administrative burden from your practice, submit a General Inquiry service request.

Photo: Adobe Stock