Manchester Capital Management On The Technical Complexity of Managing Customer Relationships

By Renee Wijnen Caruthers

Manchester Capital Management, LLC is a private wealth management firm targeting clients with investable assets of $10 million or more. The rapidly growing firm, with approximately $1.5 billion under management, and offices in Manchester, VT, and Montecito, CA, recently overhauled its IT infrastructure to achieve scale and flexibility. We spoke with Henry Morneault, senior vice president, and James Bishop, IT director, to get a better perspective on the potential their new infrastructure has to impact their business.

WFS: What were your primary goals in overhauling your IT architecture?

Henry: We started three years ago looking at positioning the company for continued growth and at that point and time we were outsourcing IT to a third party rather than a dedicated in-house person. The third-party vendor was very reactive – not for the big things but for the little things. What happened was that IT was not being viewed as a core competency. We did an assessment and came up with a multi-year plan of how to upgrade, bring IT in-house and make it a core competency for our clients and for our employees. Our goals were scalability, efficiency and enhancing client service.

James: We wanted to offer a faster, organized point of entry to access client records, files and e-mails into one location. That way, no one employee has arms around everything. If someone is out of the office, all employees are current on each client. We also wanted to automate as much as possible to eliminate human error. All e-mails in and out are automatically grabbed and placed in client records. We added video conferencing and SharePoint data storage because SharePoint interfaces with the electronic scanning system to easily index files and find documents within seconds.

WFS: From a client perspective, what changes do they see as a result of the work you have done?

James: Clients now have access to online quarterly reports. Nothing is ever pushed out – they get an e-mail that the report is ready and they login with a secure user ID and password. We have the ability for secure communications through a client’s own “virtual safe.” We have instant client portfolio values and standings. The integration of the phone systems makes sure all employees are connected so we know where people are when a call comes in, and when needed, video conferencing can help save clients travel and hotel expenses.

Henry: The real message we are sending is that we are investing in the company for their benefit. We are able to show clients we are investing in technology, better security and internal information to better serve them.

WFS: Please describe the importance of customer relationship management in your business.

Henry: Wealth management is not an overly complex business but when you look at all the systems you need to effectively manage a client relationship, you need client relationship management, transaction management, and you need to integrate these tools to manage the relationship. That’s when it becomes a more complex business in terms of the integration of the tools we need to service our clients.

James: Employees are now all on the same page with client information. No more having to put a client on hold and run to another advisor. Another aspect of CRM is marketing communications. With Outlook, we can create a marketing list and send a newsletter to selective clients. There is easy report creation on all fields within CRM. Prospect tracking is built in. Should a prospect become a client, there is a simple convert to a client button and the prospect is moved into the client database.

We also have file folder standardization. When a new client is entered into the CRM system it’s tied to SharePoint’s document management and automatically creates the whole set of standard folders and subfolders where employees will store things. Compliance tracking ensures that all necessary paperwork is logged into the system. The system is designed so that the IT staff can customize the system at will.

WFS: From the company’s perspective, what are some of the features of this project that have been most useful to your team?

Henry: A lot of institutionalized client knowledge is making our client-facing personnel more effective in dealing with clients. We are using CRM as a workflow management tool, and it also allows us to configure CRM as a project management tool. This has been important in the division of our firm that deals with commercial real estate.

James: Client files are organized; there are no randomly named files. We had the ability to build our own real estate management system that runs within the same database. The activities section stores all client e-mail communications in and out. An employee can quickly get up to speed with what has been happening with a client. Phone calls, meetings, notes on that client can all be accessed.

WFS: How did Microsoft products contribute to the new systems you put in place?

James: I have a one-word answer for that: integration.

Henry: I agree with that. The integration of all these features was essential.