One of the world’s largest financial services providers assessed the workload and productivity of its 16,000 financial advisors, and the results were not pretty. This Fortune 50 firm found that its customer-facing representatives were spending:

• 70% of their time searching for and reconciling data on customers and products
• 30% of their time on revenue-generating activities, such as cross-sell and up-sell

That’s a pretty poor ratio, and it hurt the bottom line with subpar productivity and lost revenue opportunities. Unfortunately, it’s not uncommon in financial services and other industries. And experience has shown that whatever you think your company’s ratio is, the reality is probably worse.

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For this financial services firm, the root cause of the problem was that business-critical data about customers, their products and services was spread across account-centric system silos, which prevented them from gaining a customer-centric view. Financial advisors were unable to readily identify which clients had which products. Without that insight, they couldn’t effectively cross-sell and up-sell the right products to the right customers. So they were forced to spend excessive time manually pulling information from all these separate systems into a spreadsheet.

To make matters worse, advisors couldn’t accurately measure each client’s value to the institution. The firm couldn’t tailor service levels to customer profitability, meaning that expensive services might be provided to customers of marginal profitability—while high-value customers didn’t receive the attention they deserved.

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