Securities America

Securities America, Inc. Member FINRA/SIPC, based in La Vista, NE, is an independent broker-dealer with over 30 years of experience focused on supporting advisors with high-quality advice, guidance, and resources for clients. Ranked as a national top 10 independent broker-dealer, Securities America representatives service nearly 500,000 customers across all 50 states with more than 2,000 registered representatives and over 450 staffed employees.

As Securities America continued to expand its nationwide presence, its workforce became more decentralized with satellite offices and remote employees. To accommodate the change while maintaining a high level of data security, Securities America rolled out a robust VPN and virtual desktop environment. At the same time, the organization also implemented Salesforce as its corporate CRM.

Employees were faced with a learning curve on a new CRM system, but remote employees especially struggled as they accessed systems through new methods. “Our entire team was accustomed to working primarily through their Outlook email, and requiring them to input data into Salesforce was a major roadblock,” said Dustin Strickler, CRM Business Analyst for Securities America. “We quickly realized an email integration tool would help our employees work between email and CRM, but the solution would need to meet a number of set criteria.”

Securities America searched for a solution that would integrate Outlook and Salesforce in a Citrix environment. They also needed a tool that could be customized to meet strict security standards data movement between systems while boosting end-user productivity.

Securities America’s multi-departmental approach to account management is part of what contributes to its efficiency and high quality of customer service. The right integration solution would also provide simple inroads to promote Salesforce adoption and bring together both onsite and remote employees with improved communication history. “We needed a tool that would easily capture email interactions as well as log attachments,” said Strickler. “Some of our employees were manually copying and pasting emails and files inconsistently into Salesforce.”

Securities America evaluated several solutions and then turned to LinkPoint360.”The LinkPoint Connect product was the clear choice after testing the software in our environment. Support throughout the trial process was excellent, and the software could be customized and deployed within days of evaluating it,” said Strickler. The LinkPoint360 team worked with Securities America to lock down specific settings around data syncing and provide a custom installer that was supported by their Citrix environment.

“We understand the challenges that organizations face when working across Citrix and other VDE setups,” said Glenn Lehner, Chief Business Development Officer, LinkPoint360. “Our software is designed to be flexible, so we can work with companies in the financial industry like Securities America to fit in unique installation environments and meet detailed data security needs.”

Securities America saw immediate productivity gains once LinkPoint Connect was deployed. “As accounts are passed between internal departments, the interactions are captured with email recording, and the information remains completely visible within the LinkPoint Connect Side Panel in Outlook,” said Strickler. “We now have a full picture of how accounts are being managed with a view of Salesforce data directly in Outlook. Emails and attachments are being recorded; calls are being logged.”

Strickler also noted increased Salesforce adoption. “LinkPoint Connect has clearly increased our CRM adoption. We have more activity history content and more attachments making it into Salesforce onto the correct records with consistency, helping with compliance.” With the CRM populated, employees who work predominantly out of Salesforce are able to get up to speed on an account at any point in the process and see all of the interactions, even if they were not included on the original emails. LinkPoint Connect also respects the security and permissions established in Salesforce by Securities America, a key factor with many financial services organizations.

“The enhanced visibility and productivity that results from data at your fingertips within Outlook, where everyone is used to working, is invaluable,” said Strickler. “We now have full transparency with customer accounts, which is helpful to productivity across departments. LinkPoint Connect helps ensure the interactions with prospects and clients are captured and available to every member of our team to refer to when moving to the next step in our workflow.”