AMP Wealth Management’s digital repatriation from Australia creates an opportunity for improved customer and employee engagement and experience – and a powerful platform for an ever-evolving future.

ABOUT AMP WEALTH MANAGEMENT

AMP Wealth Management is one of New Zealand’s leading financial services providers and one of the country’s most enduring companies, with continuous operations under the same brand for more than 160 years. With a mission to help its clients, employees and communities to live meaningful lives, AMP Wealth Management is committed to helping Kiwis achieve a brighter financial future, bringing this promise to life through helpful guidance and high-quality products and services like the AMP KiwiSaver Scheme.

THE CHALLENGE

A desire for AMP Wealth Management to localise from its Australian counterpart presented an exciting catalyst for AMP Wealth Management the business to take further control of its technology platform and deliver even better, faster and more personalised digital experiences to its Kiwi clients and advisers.

Shannon Botica, AMP Wealth Management’s Head of Client Services, explains, “In 2018 it was time for us to localise from Australia, and move to our own Salesforce org, which would give us the ability and flexibility to be more responsive to our clients and better customise and adapt our services to their needs.

We offer around eight different products that all operate on their own registries, with many of our clients buying more than one product from us – and getting a single view of our customer was challenging. Through the repatriation process, we saw the opportunity to bring everything together and see everything in one place, with a single customer view that we’d never had before.”

WHAT WE DID

AMP Wealth Management and Davanti have a long-standing partnership, spanning more than 10 years – and counting. And when the time came for AMP Wealth Management to look at how best to repatriate – and to understand and embrace the technology horizon and opportunities beyond this milestone – AMP Wealth Management looked to Davanti to play an integral and multi-faceted advisory role. Davanti oversaw the implementation and integration of the foundational repatriation programme, which would create an all-important “stepping stone” for AMP Wealth Management’s future. Davanti also helped AMP Wealth Management to build the internal capability and ways of working needed to enable success and realise the full value of the opportunities presented by its new platform.

Shannon says, “When you move to a new platform there are so many unknowns, and Davanti brought the expertise, advisory and support we needed to help us navigate our way forward. Our Adviser Portal was changing, our Client Portal was changing, and then we also needed our workflow to support these changes – and having Davanti bring it all together, with their knowledge and understanding of our business, was really important.”

With Davanti’s support and ongoing collaboration along the way, the AMP Wealth Management team is now empowered to embrace ongoing opportunities for improvement, Shannon says.

“Before the repatriation programme, we didn’t have a DevOps team, and we looked at things like automation and said, ‘That would be great at some point in the future,” but we couldn’t see it happening! Now we’re at the point where these things are a reality, and we’re constantly doing new things.

We now have a more agile way of doing things and continually improving, with fortnightly releases where we’re building new pieces of automation as we go. With Davanti to advise us on our ongoing journey, we have a platform in place for the future. It’s great to see the transformation.”

THE OUTCOME: IMPROVED EXPERIENCES, ALL-ROUND

Shannon Botica, AMP Wealth Management’s Head of Client Services, says, “Client experience is one of our biggest focuses, and our New Zealand Salesforce platform has given us a single customer lens, and a single view of the client, which we’ve never had before. For me, having this single view has been our greatest opportunity, and has provided us the greatest benefit. This has been especially beneficial in a Client Services context – for example, when a client calls, you can see all their communications, cases and products straight away, linked together in one place.” AMP Wealth Management now has the ability to continually adapt to client needs digitally and provide greater self-service options. Shannon says, “In this day and age, people want things quickly, and they want things to be simple. For us, being able to cater to this is really important. We want to be able to continually adapt to what our clients want, and that will change as technology changes and as people want different things. Now we’re always looking at how we can make the process simpler and help the client to do what they need to do without us needing to intervene.” Reflecting on the benefits to the AMP Wealth Management team, Shannon adds, “Our Salesforce platform and our ways of working also mean that we are now a lot more interconnected within the business. For example, our Sales and Client Services teams can now work more collaboratively, and access and share the same information in one place, which helps us to provide the best service to our clients. And from a client engagement perspective, automation through Marketing Cloud has meant that we can do a lot more without creating additional workload and overburdening the team. This means we can communicate more consistently, regularly and proactively with our clients.” This ability to focus on higher-value activity is a big win for the team, Shannon says. One particular example – resulting in significant time savings for the team – is managers’ ability to auto-allocate workflows. “Workflow allocation can chew up so much time in a leader’s day,” Shannon says. “The introduction of Omnichannel for auto-allocation probably saves two hours in leaders’ days every day, which means that they have more time to focus on our people and coach them so they can better help our clients.” “Through automation, we’ve opened the door to a lot more opportunities. Now my team are focusing on value-add activities, like interacting with and helping clients, rather than on things like manual data entry. We have much more time to think about how we can engage with our clients in a way that really helps them,” Shannon says.

“In this day and age, people want things quickly, and they want things to be simple. For us, being able to cater to this is really important. We want to be able to continually adapt to what our clients want, and that will change as technology changes and as people want different things. Now we’re always looking at how we can make the process simpler and help the client to do what they need to do without us needing to intervene.”

– Shannon Botica, Head of Client Services, AMP Wealth Management