VSL supported Defaqto in creating awareness for the new functionality of their Defaqto Engage software tool and in generating client registrations for webinar training sessions on the new functionality.  

About Defaqto 

Defaqto is an independent researcher of financial products, focused on providing intelligence to support better decision-making.  At its heart is the UK’s largest retail financial product and fund database, maintained by collecting data from across the whole market, and using expertise and insight to analyse this data and make it comparable.  From this Defaqto creates a range of products and services – ratings, software solutions, consultancy services, data services, and publications and events – to deliver this information in a meaningful way.  Its intelligence facilitates better financial decisions and greater effectiveness in the creation, management and distribution of financial products.

Project

Defaqto wanted to contact their financial adviser user base to make them aware of the new Risk profiling and fund selection functionality.  The objective of the project was to book users onto training webinars to encourage the use of the new system enhancements.

Typically, financial advisers would use a separate risk profiling tool to assess the financial risk score of the person looking to invest the money.  Defaqto has identified this and recognised that it’s important to be able to help their users, by offering the ability to assess the risk profile of their client and research funds that are mapped to their client’s risk profile.

An email campaign was undertaken by Defaqto to inform users of the new enhancements. VSL then followed up on the campaign to help spread awareness of the new functionality and get users booked onto training Webinars.

 Actions

VSL were requested to represent Defaqto in calling their client base to notify them about the new risk profiling functionality available within the tool. Initially it was thought that the campaign would involve just calling the clients.  However, the campaign evolved to include emailing clients booking them on the courses, calling to confirm their places and attendance and also rebooking those that were unable to make the sessions.

VSL worked closely with Defaqto to understand the value proposition, the campaign objectives and to ultimately book clients onto the training courses.  The communication between Defaqto and VSL was very frequent and also the portal provided an excellent tool to see the statistics in terms of the numbers of calls made and the number of webinar bookings.

Results 

The initial campaign was to call the clients already holding a license for Defaqto Engage.  VSL also contacted the members of the major adviser network that were going to be getting licences to use Defaqto Engage as their standard tool, to outline the new functionality to them and register them for the webinar sessions.  This was an additional 200 contacts.

• Over 250 webinar places were booked
• Re-bookings were made in addition to these, for those that were unable to attend but wanted to re-register
• Also, leads were passed to Defaqto
• Passing details and information of any detailed comments or feedback to Defaqto
• Client details that were incorrect in the Defaqto CRM database were updated
• New contacts were also added to the CRM database, if they were an additional user at the company
• Clients were updated on the details of Defaqto General overview training sessions and also how else they could obtain information about using Defaqto and its functionality
• Due to the level of caller on the campaign, it meant that most of the questions and issues could be dealt with, without the questions needing to be passed to Defaqto
• The interaction and communication between VSL and Defaqto was seamless

“VSL provided us with a caller who was actually able to work as an extension to our team.  With the ability to access all of our systems remotely, after what was a very short training sessions, VSL were able to operate as part of our team.  The communication was very proactive and we felt like we could trust them to really represent our brand very strongly.  Initially the project was for a trial period but the campaign worked very well and was getting the results we were looking for, so we extended it for longer.  The campaign rolled over a six month period.  We have seen the business benefit of working with VSL as our Defaqto Engage software is now having more users go on and use the risk profiling and fund mapping functionality.  I wouldn’t hesitate to use VSL again and really did feel that they were an extension of our team.  Their professionalism was second to none and it has made us feel very comfortable with outsourcing some of these core campaigns.  For us it was dipping our toes in the water of outsourcing some of our core campaigns, but it worked really well for us”