Success Story

PPA Advisors

The Customer Focus

Dan Dubay, managing principal of PPA Advisors, decided long ago that he wanted to deliver the best customer service and the best customer experience possible. To Dan, customer service isn't simply a department within a company, it's the entire company. "We don't just want our clients to love us or like us—we want them to rave about us," Dan explained.

To convert clients into fans, Dan needed to spend more time with his clients. To accomplish this, he continually looked for new ways to redirect company resources into the customer-facing areas of the business. He didn't have the resources to hire additional employees, so the most efficient and cost-effective method for increasing productivity was to leverage technology. As a result, Dan turned to Tamarac to help reduce the amount of time spent on trading accounts and generating trade orders so his staff could spend more time where it counts—with customers.

One Small Step

Dan began using Tamarac's Advisor Rebalancing™, which offers automated portfolio construction, monitoring, rebalancing, trading, and reconciliation. His clients benefit from an accurately balanced and tax-efficient portfolio, while Dan benefits from reduced overhead, improved productivity, and more time to spend with his clients.

"Advisor Rebalancing significantly increases our efficiency," Dan says. "With Advisor Rebalancing, we can rebalance hundreds of accounts in minutes, and have better trade integrity and checks and balances than we ever could have dreamed of."

When Dan realized the immediate and long-term benefits of Advisor Rebalancing, he started to explore additional offerings from the Advisor X integrated suite of products.

A GoldMine® customer relationship management (CRM) user of 15 years, Dan spent many years searching for a new CRM solution that was tailored specifically for registered investment advisors and integrated with his various back-office applications. He began using Advisor CRM™ to manage client interactions and enhance the customer experience.

With Advisor CRM, Dan can communicate better with his clients because it puts the information he needs at his fingertips. He tracks all client activities and interactions for each contact or account. During each client's quarterly review, he uses the Advisor CRM reports to show all client activity and actions taken on the account. He also leverages workflows to send automated emails to clients that keep them informed every step of the way.

Because Advisor CRM completely integrates with Microsoft Outlook, the staff at PPA Advisors quickly adopted the solution. "We were looking for a CRM that worked well with Outlook because we knew that the changeover would be much more seamless if the new CRM utilized a familiar interface," explains Dan. "And that proved to be the case."

To further deliver an improved customer experience, Dan added the powerful reporting and communications features of Advisor View™. He creates personalized performance reports using the intuitive interface, and posts the reports for his clients to view on the secure Customer Portal. The Customer Portal is branded with the PPA Advisors logo, and seamlessly integrates with the PPA Advisors website. His clients are "wowed" by the convenience of viewing reports online, while Dan is able to allocate even more resources towards client-facing areas of the business.

Customers can also upload documents to PPA Advisors via the Customer Portal, which are directly routed to the appropriate staff member based on the workflow.

All Eggs in One Basket

At first, Dan was hesitant to bundle all of his services with a single provider. However, partnering with Tamarac and working with its dedicated Customer Support team has completely alleviated his concerns. "Because of our experience with Tamarac and their service, it's not a concern," he says. "We look at Tamarac as a strategic partner that we can count on."

Thanks to his trusted relationship with Tamarac, Dan handed off his regular back-office portfolio management processes to outsourced services division, AdvisorServices. As a result, PPA Advisors has more time for clients, and can count on their data being accurate and delivered on time.

"When searching for an outsourcing solution, it was very important to have high data integrity, and have someone who could answer our questions at a moment's notice," Dan recalls. "Given the phenomenal level of service we experienced with the Tamarac customer service department, we felt very comfortable moving our portfolio management, accounting, and reconciliation over to AdvisorServices."

The implementation of the Advisor X suite significantly boosted customer satisfaction. The increased efficiency relives employees of routine tasks and allows them to spend more time with customers—where every minute counts. "Tamarac enables us to better serve our clients while reducing staff time relating to trading by 65%," Dan added. "The system gives us the capacity and scale that hiring more staff could not have."