Additionally, this ROI figure does not take into consideration the feedback we received from them on the fact that we help them generate higher investment returns and that our visualization capabilities help them truly impress their paying customers and business partners.
Hortz: Sean, in many of your interviews and articles, you have emphasized how important it is for you and your company to stay close to your advisor clients and keep identifying their key pain points. Can you share some of your best practices in engaging customers and discovering their pain points?
Brown: At YCharts, discovering and solving our customer pain points is a top priority and deliberately and systematically built into everything we do. We invest a lot of time and resources throughout the entire client life cycle—talking with them on the phone and asking a lot of exploratory questions during the evaluation process, guiding them through on-boarding by listening very carefully to their concerns, and staying in close touch by phone, e-mail and chat to continually learn about their needs once they are up and running. Many of our clients who use our Excel add-in feature call us regularly for assistance in creating or tweaking their models over time, and we gladly support these requests. We also leverage our user base in our product advisory board and during day-to-day in-person or virtual meetings and webinars. At YCharts, customer needs always come first, which is why we like to illustrate the versatility of the product and its applications with our Use Cases section of our website. We strive to be the right balance of “high tech” and “high touch.”
Hortz: What are some of the pain points to date that you have uncovered and what specific solutions have you built for them?
Brown: As you mentioned, as a result of our consistent interactions with our clients, we are in a great position to hear their business pain points and find opportunities for us to expand our products to better serve their needs. A few new items we’ve delivered in the last six months, include:
Portfolio Sync—Our wealth advisor customers told us they wanted a single dashboard where they could follow the markets as well as view their client portfolios. They also said they wanted to quickly compare the performance of their client portfolios to model portfolios, or market indices, or to run scenario analyses. We developed Portfolio Sync through an integration with Morningstar which pulls in all of their client holdings and gives our wealth advisor customers tremendous flexibility and time savings.
Screener Alerts—We have a tool that helps advisors custom-generate the filtering mechanisms they use to narrow down a universe of investment options into a few compelling candidate suggestions based on user-defined parameters, such as: discount to three-year trailing P/E, dividend yield, market sector, etc. They create the screens, save them off, and can then use them again and again. Our clients loved this functionality, but told us they wished there was a way, after they saved off their screens, that they could be automatically alerted when a security entered or exited their screening criteria, based on daily, weekly or monthly market movements. Fast forward two months, and that functionality is now in our product.
Hortz: Can you share with us a little about where your R&D is going? What areas or projects are you working on?
Brown: One of the things we are working on is charting improvements. As any company bold enough to have “Charts” in its name, the time is coming for a powerful update to this functionality. Advisors are always using our fundamental charting for analysis and client presentations, so we are currently updating our chart engine and expanding its functionality to trend lines, charting events, customizability, etc.
We’re also heavily investing in mobile user experience enhancements. As with the rest of the world, mobile and tablet usage is taking over. While most researching still takes place in the office, many advisors are on the go. Between client meetings or general travel, making YCharts more mobile/tablet-friendly is a must. And with updating our user experience, the beginnings of overall design updates will coincide with this.