An award-winning provider of wealth management technologies and products, Envestnet has created an innovative platform that helps independent advisors gain a holistic view of their clients’ financial lives. Using Envestnet’s suite of business-intelligence applications, advisors can benefit from what the company calls “unified advice,” empowering them to make better-informed recommendations based on each client’s unique financial circumstances and goals.
The company’s innovative solutions have proven so successful across the wealth management industry that today, more than 100,000 advisors use Envestnet’s technology to inform their financial guidance for more than 1,000,000 investors around the world. In fiscal year 2020, Envestnet surpassed $1 billion in adjusted revenue—with more than $1 trillion in assets under management.
For years, Envestnet has been building on its dominant industry position by regularly acquiring other financial-services firms. And although these acquisitions have been helpful for extending the company’s reach, product portfolio, and bottom line, over time they also created a major operational challenge.
A telephony infrastructure that failed the cost-benefit analysis
Jace Jones, Envestnet’s Service Desk Manager, explains that the company’s previous phone system was extremely difficult to administer, lacked key features the company needed—particularly to support its call center operations—and was prone to regular outages.
With such a problematic phone system, Envestnet’s IT team wasn’t comfortable integrating newly acquired businesses into the company’s telecommunications environment. “With each acquisition, we were picking up new phone solutions and different carrier relationships, and it became more and more difficult to stay united as one company,” recalls Jace. “It wasn’t even easy to find a colleague’s phone number in a central directory—because we didn’t have one.”
Additionally, given how important phone-based customer support is for financial-services organizations, Envestnet’s limited contact center capabilities were of particular concern to the company.
“We have a unique and relatively complicated call center setup,” Jace says. “We have one team of agents helping our advisors, another supporting our salespeople, and a floating team ready to help out whichever group needs it. Our old system wasn’t flexible or sophisticated enough to let us adjust call queues quickly to help out agents who were getting overloaded with call volume.”
RingCentral’s unified solution adds a wealth of operational improvements
When they migrated to RingCentral, Envestnet finally solved the issue of unifying the growing organization around a common communications platform. With RingCentral Office and RingCentral Video, the company now has a single cloud solution for business phone, video conferencing, online faxing, and other communication services—which employees can access anywhere.
As Jace notes, even as Envestnet acquires businesses and adds new employees around the country, the organization is operating more than ever like a united team. “With RingCentral, the thousands of employees across our company were now on the same telephony platform and in one centralized directory. That’s really helping us to feel like one team, one company.”
And when Envestnet’s support team moved their roughly 80 support agents onto RingCentral Contact Center, the company found it had a more efficient and sophisticated call center operation than ever.
“RingCentral Contact Center is great because it lets us easily set up rules to direct calls to specific agents anytime volume hits a certain amount, to prevent any team from getting overloaded and keeping clients waiting,” says Jace. “Also, because Contact Center is integrated into the rest of our RingCentral platform, it’s easy for agents to transfer a call to someone in another department, or even for employees in other departments to transfer calls to support.”
Jace adds: “We just couldn’t do these types of things with our old phone infrastructure because the systems weren’t connected. Now, it’s just a matter of a click or dialing an internal extension because everyone is on the same platform. We’ve even been able to add our receptionist as a backup on our Contact Center call queues in case of overflow. Things like this are really helping us run more efficiently and better serve our clients.”
The company has also lowered its telecommunications costs
Envestnet is also finding that RingCentral helps reduce the company’s telecommunications costs in a number of ways. As Jace explains, the biggest savings has come from being able to consolidate the company’s previous apps and vendors for phone and online meetings into a single bill. But after his team deployed RingCentral’s unified communications platform, Jace discovered another source of savings.
“I didn’t even think about it at the time we were rolling out RingCentral, but now we had a new digital fax service built into our phone solution,” he says. “That saved us money right away, by letting my team get rid of our old fax service as well as our in-house fax server and its antiquated software.”