Question | Context |
|---|---|
What types of content does your team produce? | The client reporting team will usually be responsible for client specific content, but potentially also for things like factsheets, commentaries (longer form documents like factsheets), sales presentations, and also regulatory content such as PRIIPS/KIIDS and prospectuses. If any of the above content is not mentioned, you should follow up and ask who produces it. In the case of regulatory documents these are mandatory (prospectus, PRIIPS/KIIDS for UCITS) so these must be produced somewhere. In the case of things like commentaries or sales presentations, they may be produced elsewhere in the organisation. This information |
Do you have any sort of automation in place for all these content types? | Sometimes you might find that some of the content is automated (Factsheets) but not for others (presentations). You want to understand where they have coverage as there may be some low hanging fruit for us to help with. |
What systems do you use to produce each piece of content? Do you use the same system or different ones for each? | It is common for an asset manager to use different pieces of software based on the type of content they are producing. This is because over the years certain solutions have emerged to deal with one type of content well, but without a full suite of functionality to address others. A good example of this is something like Seismic. This is used for sales presentations quite widely in the USA, but doesn’t have native translation capabilities or the ability to produce highly data rule driven content efficiently (factsheets). On the other hand the manager may have a solution for KIIDS managed by an external vendor because of the compliance sensitivity of the content. If the customer outlines a world where there are lots of different systems being used for different types of content, then this is an opportunity for us, as our platform is generally capable of consolidating many of them and therefore reducing costs for the client. |
What SLAs do you adhere to across the different types of content you produce? | All of the content they produce is time sensitive and will have an associated SLA attached to it. From the moment the data is made available, reporting teams will be under the gun to produce their content in as short a time as possible. If the content is destined for sales support then they will need to produce it quickly so sales teams can maximise its utility – as the data becomes stale the longer into the month or quarter they go. For client related content, there will be contractual commitments or at least expectations as to when content should be received. Meeting both of these expectations is important for the team and for how they are perceived in the organization. |
When you have delays in meeting SLAs, what are the main reasons? | This is a good way of asking whether they ever miss their SLA. It is worded like this to intimate that ‘everyone misses their SLA from time to time’. You want to understand what commonly drives a missed SLA. One of the common reasons is data being delivered late OR data being delivered with errors. You will often find reporting teams will spend a lot of time checking for data quality or re-running because data wasn’t correct. Remember that Kurtosys can help with that by using our healthcheck feature. Content can also be late because the process to produce the content takes too long – in some cases older software needs to run over night to produce content and then users can only review it in the morning. This means that things that should be caught quickly and corrected end up costing days. Because of our cloud engine we can produce content immediately so teams don’t have to wait for it to be reviewed. Sometimes SLAs are missed because of time taken to translate content, and again we have a solution here with our translation integration module that applies translation and localization logic to the source document rather than sending it away for translation. |
How do you measure those SLAs and report back to your stakeholders in sales? | Being able to justify the work they are doing is important. Our system provides a way of the team reporting on when they hit (or missed SLAs) but also allows them to see where the breaks might exist. |
Do you translate or localize any of your content? | For clients in Europe this will be an almost definite ‘Yes’. It is often a pain point because content must be produced then sent to a translator for localization. As explained above, we apply localization (formatting dates and numbers) and translation natively in the files we create, meaning that it is a much smoother and easier process. |
If so, what is your process for managing those translations. | Receiving translations from vendors externally is another pain point. Our system has a workflow for systematizing this process and even allows them to apply a workflow to it. |
Where do you distribute your documents to once they’re completed? | The materials will need to be sent to third parties (like morningstar) or other distribution partners. We provide tools to fully automate this distribution activity so understanding if it is a manual activity or automated can help us understand if we can add value. |
How do your sales teams retrieve the documentation? What’s the process for getting it to them? | Putting the content in the hands of sales people is the most important outcome for sales related material. There should be a convenient place where sales people can search for and download it. This is often the website, but it is not always common that there is an efficient and integrated way of getting it there. Our value is having an automated feed to the digital channel from our doc production center, and having components that can natively display those documents without the client having to lift a finger |
What about for client materials? How do they receive those reports? | Like sales people, clients are important recipients of this content. Again having a place where clients can securely retrieve these materials is key. A portal can do this, and we can provide both the secure document hub and the automated mechanism for distribution. |
Do you have any analytics into what type of content is most popular or useful for the distribution team? | Often marketing teams will produce a lot of content and not have any sense of what is being used. Using Kurtosys document analytics they can understand which material is most important. This can help with prioritization (getting that content out first) as well as guiding the creation of new content (we had a customer that observed through our analytics that a particular piece of long form content – called a fund portait – was very popular with advisors. While this piece of content was not automated, and therefore took a while to produce, they saw that by producing more of them across their range of funds, they would better support their sales partners, so took the decision to invest in it based on the data available to them. |
How do you make changes to your content templates? | In most automation systems, making changes to data driven templates can be tricky, because there are lots of complicated compliance and display rules in place. Because of our investment in studio we make this process very straightforward, and even offer a managed service with fast SLAs on turnaround times. This minimizes disruption to the asset manager and helps them to focus on their core business. |
How often do you need to make those changes? | As Above |
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