Axio Financial Taps Vonage to Make Sales Teams More Efficient

According to a recent survey by Finextra Research, 83% of respondents claim their financial institution’s existing core technology can no longer support the company’s needs. In an increasingly competitive market, the savviest financial companies are turning to SaaS and cloud-based services as part of their infrastructure.  Since 2010, Axio Financial, a US broker-dealer that specialises in selling structured financial products, has led the way in making this transition, teaming with best-of-breed technology partners to help scale and innovate its business workflows and operations throughout their entire structured products lifecycle.

Axio’s mission is to use data, technology and people to add value throughout the entire structured products lifecycle, which means from idea generation through maturity.  This creates a challenge for Axio’s sales team to manage such a vast amount of information in a fast and dynamic financial market environment. 

Supporting aggressive growth and ground-breaking innovation at Axio Financial

By 2015, Axio had grown so substantially that it needed to build a next-generation platform to address the increased volume and diversity of its business. To accomplish these goals, Axio Financial needed to integrate its enterprise database and data infrastructure with strategic application and communication solutions partners to create a full-featured contact centre solution to:

● Integrate natively with Salesforce

● Leverage Axio's advanced data analytics

● Empower the organisation’s in-office, hybrid and remote staff

● Support broker dealer, bank and RIA financial advisers

● Allow efficient, fast and flexible functionality modifications and enhancements 

Vonage was the one company that could meet all of the communications platform related criteria. Its Vonage Business Communications (VBC) unified communications service and Vonage Contact Center omnichannel contact centre product enabled Axio Financial to integrate voice interactions into their key Salesforce workflows, offer mobile access to the advanced calling features needed by the organisation’s salespeople and improve salesperson efficiency.

 The Combined Vonage and Axio Financial Acceleration Platforms

Today, Axio operates using its Axio Acceleration Platform, a custom integration of its enterprise database with customised versions of the Microsoft, Salesforce and Vonage platforms. The combined solution leverages Vonage in-office VoIP telephony, advanced analytics empowering flexible real-time dial list creation and seamless remote office communications.

The Vonage Contact Center dialler integration with Salesforce allows Axio’s salespeople to be far more efficient. Vonage and the advanced data that Axio Financial Acceleration Platform populates and updates each night in Salesforce, allows each individual Axio salesperson to create his or her own or shared complex filters and analyses to populate dial lists in an online, real-time manner while in Salesforce. This includes making sure that customised business rules relating to how often people are called for different circumstances are followed.

In the Vonage Contact Center, a dialler is embedded natively within Salesforce and eliminates the manual dialling process by giving the Axio Financial salesperson the ability to create, filter and automatically load their own dial lists. The lists are based on both the statistics calculated daily in the Axio Financial data infrastructure and on the preferred criteria of the salespeople. Additional customised functionality prevents two different people from calling the same contact and provides the ability to quickly restrict any area codes based upon natural disasters or otherwise.

Since Axio salespeople will frequently reach a prospect’s voicemail, the Vonage intelligent voicemail click-to-drop and then dial-the-next-number feature maximises the efficiency of a salesperson’s time and makes sure that the first delivered voicemail sounds as good as the last at the end of the day. With all of these integrated features, Axio, for the past several years, has seen a significant improvement in both total and average talk times with its clients, including a 500 per cent year-over-year talk time uplift for 2018, while outbound dialling attempts increased just 30 per cent in the same period!

Improving Productivity with Mobility Features

With the Vonage Business Communications mobile app, an Axio salesperson is able to work from anywhere with integrated communications functionality, including answering their desk phone on their mobile device and mobile dialling from their desk phone.  A single number is all that is needed, whether in the office or out in the field. A salesperson is able to send and respond to customer SMS messages directly, call, answer and transfer calls and chat with colleagues, all from the one app that resides on their mobile device.