Covisum Founder and President, Joe Elsasser, CFP®, is also practicing financial advisor. In our new vlog series, Advisor Anecdotes, Joe will offer his unique perspective on current events, practice management best practices, financial technology, and everything in-between. 

Episode One: Scheduling Virtual Client Meetings

Virtual Client Meetings_FINAL

 

Today, I wanted to talk a little bit about a practice management technique that a lot of our advisors are using in order to maintain contact with their clients through these current economic challenges. Connect the following four tech options to coordinate 30-minute Zoom meetings for your clients in which you can use your own planning technology. 

Hopefully, your planning technology is ours (Income InSight, Tax Clarity, Social Security Timing, and SmartRisk), but even if it's not, regardless of what planning technologies you use, this is exactly the time to be in front of clients sharing with them the impact of this risk event on their plan.

Can they maintain their current course?

Should they make course adjustments?

Those are the kinds of questions that you want to be addressing with each client right now.

One of the things that's really nice about Calendly is it can check multiple calendars to look for conflicts. If you have a couple of different team members who need to be on a call, you can do that through Calendly. Redtail, which our practice uses, doesn't have a native integration with any of the scheduling apps.

3 Steps to Make it Work

  1. Connect an Office 365 and use the Redtail sync feature.

  2. Connect that Office 365 account to Calendly.

  3. Create a Zoom account.

This allows you to go from Calendly to the Office 365 calendar, which will be updated with your Redtail calendar. Calendly can create appointments that will then be synced back with your Redtail calendar. This can be a really clean process.

Security Using a Unique Zoom Link

If you start doing due diligence on Zoom, you may see that before you'd use a personal meeting ID. Now, there are a couple of security features enabled, namely a password and a unique meeting ID for each meeting. Zoom can put in a unique meeting link for every single meeting it schedules on your behalf.

What Does the Process Look Like?

  1. Send an email to all of your clients offering them a 30-minute review of their plan.
  2. Inside the email include a Calendly link. The client will choose their meeting time.
  3. Calendly will send the client a confirmation that includes the unique Zoom link.
  4. Click on your calendar in Redtail, and it will be updated. 

It’s a very clean process that includes technologies that are highly likely to pass your internal review process. So, I would suggest evaluating those technologies. They're a great combination, particularly if you use Redtail. This stack can work well in this new environment.

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