How to Maximize Client Engagement with RightCapital Tasks

Joe M.: And it's because I don't have any admin work. I don't need a paraplanner to schedule the meetings. My clients just get the RightCapital reminders and they schedule themselves.

And then I just go in and take the confirmation email that you're used to getting from online booking stuff, and I just copy over the little thing that says, anything you want to add to the meeting agenda, copy it over, paste it, move the date, and hooray, I'm prepped for the meeting now. It's an efficiency thing where you can replace an entire support role if you really trust the software to be a shared medium for you and your clients to all know what's going on.

Joe M.: Then in terms of them scheduling a meeting, every time we finish a meeting I send them — and I use these brackets to say, when I add this task, because I'm using templates, I need to choose: am I telling my client in February, March-ish, before you file your taxes, to schedule a 90-minute meeting? Or is it September-ish, aka the fall? Are they scheduling the meeting then?

So I just delete whatever I need to in order to make sure it says what it needs to say when I upload it to each client. This one is a most-used task template, because that's what makes it so powerful.

Joe M.: So over here in templates again, I've had more in the past. Right now I've settled on 8. Seems to be what my brain works well with.

So what I have is, when I onboard a client, I have a meeting agenda that I like to onboard them with. But it's not just the meeting agenda itself. You'll notice on here that there's my financial planning software tour and making sure that I unlock those tasks, dashboard, vault, tasks. So I make sure they actually get access to stuff, and then sign a client agreement, talk to them about what their preferred communication style is, and when do we want to meet next? And then always optional reading. But that's what an agenda looks like. You'll see those every time I click through these.

And then onboarding goes on and on. I won't take you through all six of these, but as you can see, each meeting, everything after they book it, I add the date, time, month, URL. I use Google Meet, but people can use Zoom links, and it's the same sort of thing, making sure I don't miss anything.

When I'm onboarding clients, they all go through the same process of, here's cash flow, and we talk about budgeting, and we talk about unlocking the RightCapital tabs for budget, liquidity, debt, and student loans.

And then in meeting four we switch to employment benefits stuff, and we unlock the investment tabs about tax allocation and education tab. We also make sure we talk about 529 plans if we need to, if they have kids and they need to start those, and we unlock that tab. Optional reading next meeting.

And then meeting 5, make sure that we have, again you'll see the consistency here, date, time, URL. Always start with whatever their to-be-discussed items are. So this is all the stuff that I want to talk about and get through. But if they put stuff on here that takes the whole hour or 90 minutes, then we just spend the whole hour and 90 minutes doing what they want to do. And again, down here, RightCapital, make sure that I unlock the insurance tabs: life insurance, disability, property and casualty. So you'll see that I'm not overwhelming clients by giving them everything. My whole first year of onboarding is teaching them slowly how RightCapital can integrate and actually be helpful to them.

And then lastly, sixth meeting in the first year, we unlock the retirement tabs, the analysis, the cash flows, the snapshot.

Jeff McDermott: I definitely would say that before using tasks as much as I use them now, I was writing very lengthy post-meeting follow-up emails, always logging my notes in the CRM and a similarly lengthy follow-up email to the client with bullet points and step-by-step, let's do this, this is next on the list. And that was administratively burdensome for me.

I'm not sure that the client read very much of it. I'm sure they didn't, because I could tell by the follow-up emails I would get as if they hadn't read it, because why would they?

So now a lot of my post-meeting follow-up emails sound more like, it's great talking to you, glad we got to work through these couple of things. I've uploaded two or three tasks in RightCapital that cover our next steps. Take a look at them and let me know if you have questions. And that has offloaded a lot of that email follow-up and lengthy post-email communication versus a few bulleted tasks in RightCapital that cover exactly what we talked about and just boiled down to the action steps.

Sherry Irwin: I would look at it from the client's point of view, and I would say it helped, like what you said earlier, it helped us not have to chase documents so much. We're not chasing documents. We're chasing them to say, go look at your tasks. But at least we're not telling them specific documents now.

Andrea Clark: It keeps the clients better focused. This is our planning tool and we do all the things there. We ask you questions, we give you your action items. It's where your plan lives and breathes and can be changed. So it helps the client stay focused, because we're all virtual. So making the most of the least number of tools.

Sherry Irwin: And was it a best practice or recommendation? I think the thing that Andie also mentioned earlier is when we first, for new clients, we're especially walking them through, this is where your tasks are going to be. We show them two or three meetings. We'll start the meeting and say, how are you doing on your tasks? And we'll bring up the tasks and walk through that. So that's helpful too, for both sides to reinforce the importance of using them.

Jeff McDermott: I feel like tasks are really helpful both for the client and for me. For the client, of course, it helps put that reminder out there and helps us get stuff done. If they really like to get into RightCapital, they can go into the tasks section under the dashboard and see what we have queued up for them to work on next. Even if they don't necessarily log into the software, the emails can send out to them to remind them of what we talked about. What's next up on the to-do list?

I try to be fairly detailed in what I enter for the tasks. So I don't just put, increase your retirement contribution. I'll put in there what we talked about: increase your retirement contribution to 15% pre-tax, or switch to 15% Roth, or whatever it is. So they have the information they need to make the change.

Then on my end, it's great because it saves me a lot of that follow-up work in terms of sending out emails and continuously checking in. I can see if they've done something, if they actually mark the task as complete, or if the client has questions, they often respond directly back to me via the task email that they got. So it really helps with that communication chain.

And I think also for me and for the client, it helps keep a log of what we've accomplished since we've started working together. So we see where they started, and now we reallocated the portfolio, we moved these accounts from here to there, we set up that emergency fund, we set up your life insurance, all these things we've worked on. Now it's also a log of the great things we've done together.

Andrea Clark & Sherry Irwin: Tasks are super important for us and our clients. We use it all the time. Number one, new client onboarding. It gives people very specific instructions where exactly to go in RightCapital, once they do their initial inputs in RightCapital during our prospecting workflow.

We meet with people, we get to know them, and if they think that we might be a good fit for them to work with, then we will schedule a second meeting. And in between the first and second meetings, we give them access to RightCapital. When we give them access to RightCapital, we send them a little video you guys have for creating your profile that's embedded in the email invitation that they get. And then it goes through a few things to tell them what to expect when they start doing this process.

But once they've decided to sign on as clients, they've seen the portal already, they've created their profile, and they have the whole bar of options across the top. Then Sherry's the mastermind behind us who created all these tasks and told them exactly where to go, and we tell them some won't apply to you, so just check those off and be done with them.

The other thing that's important about these is, like Andie mentioned, we added links in there so they know exactly what to do and where to go with each task. We've also put them in a sequential order with some staggered dates so they're not overwhelmed when they look at the list, if we were to send this to everybody all at once. So having the ability to stagger the dates and add the initial due date is great. So then they get five emails, and then they'll get some emails later with five more tasks.

We like the reminder emails. Clients see them. Sometimes clients email us back and apologize, I'm sorry I haven't done this yet, I'm going to get to it this weekend. But it keeps us from having to keep track of clients getting us all the information we need for their onboarding process. And the other thing is they ask how they can turn it off, and the answer is, do your stuff. Do the thing and check the box. It doesn't bother us. It's overdue, you're the one getting the reminders.

I think those new client onboarding tasks also help get people familiarized with RightCapital so they know where to go find things. And it makes them a little more self-sufficient, so when the review meetings are coming up, they know where to go to change their income, and they know where to go to upload a document and how it's all organized in the vault. And they know where to go to the retirement tab to actually see their plan, to find the cash flows. The waterfall thing is amazing.

So I would say some of our clients who have come on board since we started using more of these task templates, they help themselves a little more and they're more engaged with their numbers and their information.

Jeff McDermott: I would say be specific and detailed with the tasks so that the client has the information they need to get the task done.

Do remember that the tasks will be emailed to the client, so don't put any sensitive information in the task. Even though it's housed within RightCapital and behind their login, the email and the details are going to go to the client. So I've tried to be careful of that.

But put everything in that task: links — you can hyperlink in the tasks if the client needs to click out to the website or something like that. You can create bulleted lists and things like that within the tasks.

So when the client gets that email, it can feel like the email came right from you. Even though it's built into the task, it can give the client everything they need to know to complete the task. It doesn't just have to be, call someone about life insurance.

Andrea Clark & Sherry Irwin: It's also iterations. I would just encourage people to start using tasks, because, like we said, our clients were resistant, but now they're trained. So if you set the client expectation that this is how you work with us — we build it into our get-to-know-you meeting now. This is the platform we use. We bring up our sample client, we can show them what the vault looks like, we can show them what tasks look like, we show them how to check off tasks and make sure they do the two steps.

It's setting client expectations. Some things don't work, and then you just have to figure out a new process. So if tasks don't work for your client at first, don't give up right away. Tweak it a little bit and sell it a different way. Say it a different way, or show what's in it for them. What about it is going to make their life easier?

And something else we do a lot lately, we make little Loom videos that we send to clients. So if there are actions they need to take and they're not doing it, I'll make a little Loom video and say, here I am, I'm logged into your portal, this is what you see when you log in here. I am going to Tasks in the dashboard and checking things off, and this one says to do this. And then I'll navigate in their portal to that place so they see it.

Sometimes it just takes a little video that they can watch two or three times. And Loom tells you when they've watched it two or three or ten times, so that helps too. And you can drop that in the vault too, and you can drop it into a task. Those links are great, and leaving them in places that they can go back to over and over again, so they're not going to get lost in the email shuffle.