By Anthony Schorling

Introduction

One of the biggest challenges for advisors starting their own firm is figuring out the right pieces of tech to add to their tech stack. Outside of compliance, perhaps the biggest consideration to make is choosing technology that has the ability to connect with other tech that you use. A lot of the time, Zapier can be used to connect various pieces of tech, but it can be time-consuming to not only learn the ropes, but also set up various automations to get two apps to talk to each other. Instead, the easier method is often finding tech that supports direct integrations with your other tech, and GReminders is a great place to start!

As they say on their website, GReminders does not believe in "another calendar". Instead, it acts as a powerful extension of your existing calendar by providing functionality such as robust reminders, easy-to-use online scheduling, and various workflow automation features. Currently, they integrate with the very large majority of advisors' calendars - either via Google or Microsoft.

GReminders is an outlier in the world of scheduling systems, as they are the only scheduling system that directly integrates with Wealthbox and Redtail - two popular CRMs amongst the financial advisory industry. Having seamless data flow between the two systems serves to save advisors and their operations/support staff time so that they can spend less of their energy on data entry and internal tasks, and more on clients.

Below, you'll find some of the out-of-the-box features that make GReminders a great choice for new advisors!

Scheduling

GReminders offers many of the same scheduling features as other industry leaders, such as the ability for clients to self-schedule, embedding scheduling widgets into your website, group scheduling, and event routing, but it also gives users a few more benefits that others may not have.

Final Booking Approvals

One of these unique benefits to GReminders is the ability to approve or decline a booking before it becomes official. This gives advisors more flexibility within their schedule, despite already having preset availability. We've all been in scenarios where our calendars are technically open, but someone books at a time that is inconvenient for one reason or another - potential travel delays, a previous appointment that may go longer than expected, running behind schedule with client projects, etc. Whatever the case may be, this feature is bound to be useful at a time where you can really use the extra bandwidth.

According to GReminders themselves, they see advisors use this feature more for business-related ventures as opposed to doing so with clients. 

Recurring Appointments

If you meet with clients on a consistent basis of some kind, this feature is for you!

Maybe you have a weekly meeting with other departments of your team, a monthly meeting with a vendor, or conduct semi-annual/surge meetings with clients. It's very easy for a task to schedule a follow-up appointment to fall through the cracks. Thankfully, the ability to set recurring appointments ensures that the ball won't be dropped by either your team or the client, all while saving your team from having to remember to help get something new on the calendar.

Post-Scheduling Questions

A feature designed with first-outreach prospects in mind, setting up post-scheduling questions allows advisors to gather additional information after a prospect books, but before actually meeting with them. While you may wish to collect data before a prospect books, these questions are often very general as to not overwhelm the prospect, or focused on routing them to the correct meeting link or resource. Post-scheduling questions are often used to gather more personal data, which helps break down the overall meeting time, as well as helps get prospects in the door better.

Reminders

Most scheduling tools only have baseline reminder systems built for emailing or texting clients about appointments. On the other hand, GReminders' reminder system is incredibly robust and offers functionality that you may not even realize could benefit you.

Voice Reminders

For those that work with an older client base that can't see text or handle technology well, voice reminders may be a desirable feature to have in your repertoire.

Automated Reschedule Notifications

With GReminders, you don't need to worry about sending a notification to your client about rescheduling. All you need to do is move the appointment, and GReminders will do the rest. With some initial setup, this also applies to meetings dispositioned as "no-show"s, so that allows prospects and clients to reschedule an identical appointment - both the event type and the advisor they're meeting with - at a date and time that works for them.

Dynamic Automatic Replies

One of GReminders' coolest reminder features is the ability to set up automated replies based on how clients/prospects respond to your initial reminder. This is a great feature in instances where they need to request to reschedule, or perhaps need an answer to a commonly-asked question. Once you set it up, GReminders will take care of it so that you can remain as hands-off as possible with replies.

Reminders on Manually-Scheduled Events

Perhaps the most impactful reminder feature offered by GReminders is their ability to send reminders to manually-scheduled events on your calendar. Their bi-directional sync with your calendar allows the app to send reminders to any manually-scheduled event based on the reminder guidelines that you've set up in your GReminders account. Even if your appointment was scheduled by one of Calendly, OnceHub, or Acuity, GReminders will be able to automatically send the invitees reminders as directed by how you've conditioned them.

Direct Integrations

GReminders' biggest selling point is its robust direct connection with popular financial advisory CRMs, Wealthbox and Redtail. Having the ability to link directly to your CRM will save advisors hours upon hours of monotonous data entry tasks over the course of the year. Here is some of the functionality provided by their integrations:

• Create New Contacts - Occurs as soon as a new prospect books with you.
• Specify Contact Status - Specify a status to be applied to your contact when they schedule with you.
• Send Reminders Based on Time Zone - GReminders will utilize your contact's zip code to determine when a reminder should be sent within their time zone.
• Assign Events an Activity Type in Redtail and a Category in Wealthbox - Events will automatically be assigned an activity type or category based on how you set up the event type in GReminders.
• Map Custom Scheduling Questions to Custom Fields - If you ask invitees custom questions in your scheduling process, their answers can be output to custom fields in your CRM. 
• Route Clients to Specific Advisors - Through routing forms, GReminders can use a client's email address to ensure that the client schedules with the proper advisor marked on their contact.
• Ignore Specific Activity Types in Redtail - GReminders allows users to deselect activity types that would otherwise block your calendar or send reminders regarding the activity.
• Use Nicknames in Reminders - For a more personal touch, GReminders is set to prioritize nicknames on a client's contact record when sending them reminders.
• Automatically Launch Workflows - When a prospect or client schedules a meeting with you, GReminders can trigger a workflow or multiple workflows in your CRM, based on how you've set up the meeting type.
• Automatically Create Opportunities - With a bit of setup, you can set up event types to automatically create opportunities so that nothing gets lost in the pipeline.
• Automatically Send Birthday/Anniversary Notifications - You can tell GReminders to automatically reach out to a client to wish them a happy birthday or anniversary when important dates from your CRM come up.
• Launch Engagements in PreciseFP - Thanks to their direct integration with PreciseFP, you can set up event types in GReminders that will launch engagements in PreciseFP as you direct.

Other Noteworthy Features

Although you may not need it thanks to the robustness of their direct integrations, GReminders actually supports the use of Zapier webhooks within their app. This allows users to effectively use GReminders to trigger automations using Zapier's expansive app/integration library, despite technically not having a Zapier integration themselves.

You can read more about how to set up webhooks in GReminders in this post on their website.

In addition to webhook usage, GReminders also offers a built-in AI notetaker that advisors can use to their advantage in and around meetings. The AI notetaker is set up to be able to do things like transcribe meeting notes, draft a meeting summary with notable action items, generate emails to clients, and create tasks within your CRM based on the action items outlined in your meetings.

Finally, GReminders is compliant. They work with compliance professionals to ensure that their platform, which runs on FINRA-approved Microsoft Azure servers and are secured with end-to-end bank-level encryption, meets advisor requirements.

Conclusion

At its core, GReminders' mission is simple - create an easy-to-use platform for advisors that communicates with other tech that they use to help save them time. This mission, which they have greatly achieved, not only makes the lives of experienced advisors easier, but also makes a massive impact helping new advisors get off the ground by taking some of the guess work out of tech stack selection.

We're always eager to learn about new fintech, especially if it integrates well with other apps! GReminders is no exception to this, and is sure to become a piece of tech that we see more often as we continue serving advisors.

If you'd like assistance with building out automations for your firm, or just need help figuring out where to get started, book an intro call with us! We're happy to learn about your situation and assist however we're able to.

Thanks for reading! If you feel so inclined, you can read past editions of the Sphynx Automation blog series, as well as get notified about future posts on our website.