TIME Investments

Up-to-date CRM technology empowers TIME to deliver predictable returns in an unpredictable world

Working to help their clients rest easy, TIME Investments is a specialist investment manager that provides carefully considered investments geared toward stable, long-term returns.
TIME believes that caution and patience are the foundation of the best, most reliable financial products. Its primary offerings are income funds and estate planning services.

The organisation works with hundreds of large brokerage firms and institutional clients, using complex technology to aggregate investment opportunities. It’s imperative for the team at TIME to make sense of this immense array of constituents and stakeholders, and more specifically, to organise and optimise the vast amount of data this industry can deliver.

Roadmap To Success

Recognising their outdated systems, TIME Investments’ founder and managing director, Nigel Ashfield, decided it was time to take steps towards achievable implementation goals. To move away from their manual processes, the organisation needed a clear roadmap, which included creating a vision for how the organisation wanted to work, as opposed to just updating the technology. It was also necessary to craft a transformation plan that included a delivery strategy, new technology, and an effort from the team as a whole to drive the change.

The technology project was delivered as part of a transformation project with business outcomes, aiming at becoming more digitally mature and customer-centric.

The strategic approach began with answering the question of how their business could be enhanced with the new technology implemented. The outcomes included optimising customer and partner operations, allowing the team to be more efficient and profitable, and streamlining their front office operations, which now gives TIME space to create more impactful, personalised relationships with their customers.

Nigel explained that with their newly implemented processes, they can ‘make great service even bigger.’ Client services teams, business development teams, and marketing teams are now able to collaborate more effectively, broadening the business’s horizons.

Data Strategy as a base for operational performance

The TIME Investments team turned to us here at redk to help them build a data strategy that included creating a structure to collect all data related to client relationships, with all the necessary data centralised it would be used to create operational capabilities and an accurate view of the customer.

‘We wanted to bring our customer-facing teams closer together through the use of technology and automate a number of processes that were previously run through manual overrides – and in that way, support our internal teams to help them deliver best-in-class service to the market.’ – Nigel Ashfield, Founder and MD

As the organisation has such a broad portfolio of both products and constituents, it needed coherence between all departments in order to continue offering the most effective and personalised service to its clients. The biggest challenge? They didn’t have a clear understanding of what it meant to implement CRM or what the technology could do to help deliver on their goals.

Business Outcomes Powered by Modern Technology

This transformation process needed to go far beyond the features of the software, Salesforce. In order to efficiently set up and personalise the software, we needed to fully grasp the reality of the business and its operational model, the people with their roles and functions, the business processes, and their then-current technology set-up.

First, we worked to understand the long-term vision of what TIME Investments needed to achieve, then we broke it down into operational areas. We then further defined those operational areas into functional units to support the business, all powered by the extensive data that is collected throughout the business.

Thanks to this extensive discovery process, we were able to take TIME Investment’s business objectives and incorporate them into a design that dictates how the technology can help improve the model. The operational areas were sales, account management, marketing, and customer service, and we implemented three Salesforce CRM solutions to cover each of them.

The company now uses Salesforce for B2B marketing, Salesforce Sales Cloud, and Salesforce Service Cloud. Streamlining these operations and giving the entire team full access has since impacted their customer relationships.

As a salesforce partner with over 15 years of experience in CRM, redk provided the technological know-how and best practices that helped TIME to implement its new technology with speed and quality, with the project delivered on time and budget.

‘The expertise of redk as a business has helped them to get the best out of us and to drive a successful project and transformation’ – Faye Williams, Internal Sales Director

The redk Difference

Today, organisations are rushing to buy modern tech but not fully understanding how to make the most of the ample technology available and how it fits their digital ecosystem, meaning the tools can’t reach their complete potential.

Transformation is all about creating the digital capabilities required to adapt to the demands of the modern customer – the “connected customer”.

A key element in the TIME Investments transformation process, was the governance framework established to create and maintain momentum throughout the project, so to be able to deliver on a long and difficult journey. This governance included the constant support offered by the leadership team, with the direct CEO’s support.

The executive team backed the project financially with resources of time and personnel as well as executive sponsorship. This continuous backing gave us at redk the time to take the company’s complex ecosystem and enhance it across the board.

‘From my perspective, the support that they gave me as someone new in the business and during the pandemic was absolutely fantastic.’ – Adam Field, Project Manager

Looking to the future, we at redk are working with TIME to help them gain an even further reach. redk is more than just providers of technology, we are your partners, we help organisations to overcome the challenges of the customer journey by implementing technological capabilities that can help you be digitally mature and customer centric.