In the space of about 15 years, Redtail Technology has gone from a little known cloud-based CRM start-up to become one of the leading providers of CRM software to financial advisors.
According to the 2017 Inside Information/T3 Technology Survey, Redtail CRM was the most popular CRM application among respondents. It also received the highest user satisfaction rating among CRM providers with a market share greater than 2 percent. So when Redtail decides to launch a new product, we take notice.
The new product that Redtail is launching is called Redtail Speak, a compliance-approved, real-time communication platform for financial advisors.
“This is the first instance of an industry-specific application that is directly embedded into the CRM, enabling advisors to communicate with clients safely and securely via text messages,” says Redtail CEO Brian McLaughlin. “It will drastically change the way advisors communicate with their clients.”
McLaughlin credits Orion Advisor Services as being a catalyst for Speak. He says that the Speak idea grew out of Redtail’s entry into the Orion FUSE hackathon two years ago. The entry was an award winner at the event, validating the concept. Apart from Orion’s own entries at FUSE, this is the first product that has reached commercial launch. “Other firms have launched a feature initiated at FUSE, but never a product,” McLaughlin says.
“Advisors have been searching for compliant ways of communicating via text message, but until now, the choices have been limited,” he says.
It is easy to understand why the demand for compliant text messaging by advisors is so great. According to McLaughlin, 80 percent of adults text every day. And it is not just millennials that are texting. Adults over 55 years of age send or receive over 500 texts per month, he says. Millennial usage is about three times that. In addition, over 75 percent of adults have a positive impression of firms that support text communications.
Perhaps even more compelling for advisors, however, is that texts are much more likely to be read by clients and prospects. Redtail’s research indicates that the open rate for texts is over 99 percent, compared with about 66 percent for email. The response times for text message are appealing as well. Research indicates that text messages are generally responded to within three minutes.
Despite these highly favorable metrics, Redtail believes that only about 10 percent of advisors are using text, primarily due to the challenges surrounding archiving and compliance.
Redtail Speak changes all of that. With Speak, an advisor can send a text message from the Speak platform to the client’s mobile number. The client then responds by text to the advisor. Both the outgoing message and the incoming message from the client are archived by Speak in a compliant manner. It is searchable and retrievable by authorized personnel within the firm. Speak allows attachments as well, so advisors can send reports to clients and clients can send documents to advisors.