From the takeaway counter to silver service

A five-star restaurant is only as good as its team. You can have the best ingredients and the most refined recipes, but if your team can't deliver, the experience falls flat. 

This is where you, the Xplan Site Administrator, come in. You're the head chef or the maître d'; the "master of the house" who’s responsible for ensuring the team is not only well-equipped but well-trained and empowered to deliver exceptional service.

I started my working life in a small beachside restaurant. At 18, I was fortunate enough to work for Christa, an owner who was laser-focused on providing exceptional customer service.

At the end of one shift, Christa asked me, “Did anyone have to ask you for anything?”

I was confused. My job was literally to wait on people; they asked me for everything – for wine, their meal, the bill.

Christa’s response changed my perspective forever:

“It is not your job to wait.” she said. “It is your job to anticipate.”

I learned that night that exceptional customer service isn't just about delivering what's asked; it's about knowing what someone needs before they even know themselves. This principle applies directly to modern advice practices and technology. 

So: how do you help your team, or your systems, go from simply taking orders to delivering silver service and anticipating every need?

Mastering onboarding and offboarding

The team's journey with Xplan begins and ends with you. Onboarding a new team member doesn’t end with providing their login credentials – a well-thought-out and supportive onboarding process is critical. 

In the hospitality industry, first-year apprentices are supported with both theoretical and practical application of what it takes to become a successful chef. New users in a financial planning practice should be, too.

What does this entail?

• Access and credentials: ensuring suitable licenses and capabilities and the set up of their Iress ID is the first step. Ensure all relevant parts of their profile are completed so their details merge seamlessly into your coded templates.
  
  
• Personalising logins: Walk them through how to set their User Preferences, including time zone, email signature, calendar integration and which page to set as their default “Start Page After Login”. (We recommend the Task Hub. Help them set up role specific client and user dashboard widgets.
  
  
• Foundational training: Walk them through your Xplan site and your specific ways of working. Make sure they understand the fundamentals around logging in and navigation, client management, document management, and workflow.
  
  Use the Task Hub to filter, group, and conquer outstanding tasks for efficiency. This will empower your team to manage their workload rather than dread it.
  
  
• Role-specific training: This is where you train each team member for their station. The Xplan Learning Pathways in the Iress Learning Centre are a great way to ensure each team member knows the parts of the system they need to do their job:
  
  
• Advisers: focus on client meetings, fact-finding, creating Statements of Advice and generating reports.
• Paraplanners: focus on drafting advice documents, utilising modeling tools and working with data feeds.
• Administrators: focus on client data management, client portal support and managing workflows.
  
  
• Integrations: Explain how to manage datafeeds and other software integrations.
  
  
• Schedule check-ins: Hold regular one-on-one meetings to answer their Xplan questions and provide feedback.

A solid onboarding process will provide your team with the foundations to shift their focus to anticipating client needs rather than simply getting the job done.

The importance of ongoing training

The world of financial advice is constantly changing, and so is Xplan. As an ever-evolving system, you need to foster a culture of continuous learning. A restaurant won’t retain its competitive advantage if it just serves up the same dishes from year to year, after all. 

You need clean, up-to-date data and well-trained users if you want your firm to successfully leverage future tech like agentic AI and meet your data-driven goals.

A great way to foster this culture is to:

• Subscribe to release notes: These notes are your early warning system for new features, bug fixes, and system enhancements. By staying ahead of the curve, you can prepare your team for changes and ensure a smooth transition.
  
  
• Disseminate updates internally: Run tailored internal training sessions or send out quick, digestible updates to your team. A five-minute rundown on a new feature can save hours of frustration later.
  
  
• Assign champions: Ask for volunteers or assign champions to specific areas of Xplan that align with their job role or interests. Ask a paraplanner to stay on top of updates to the modelling tools and share these with the team regularly.
  
  
• Shortcut your favourite menu items: Encourage the team to "Star It!" to save frequently-used screens (like Reconciliation Summary or Policy Search ) to their My Links menu , saving them valuable clicks.
  
  
• Keep an eye out for upcoming training sessions via the Iress Learning Centre.

Leveraging your resources

You don't have to be a one-person training department. Iress provides a wealth of resources designed to help you and your team master Xplan:

• Iress Learning Centre: Your digital training ground. Think of it as your digital culinary school, offering masterclasses and recipes to help your team hone their skills quickly.
  
  
• Iress Community: Your chef's handbook. It contains not only recipes but the fundamental techniques, best practices for ingredient preparation and troubleshooting tips for common kitchen problems.
  
  
• Advisely: Your chef's table. A place to share secrets, troubleshoot a tricky recipe and learn from other masters in the field.

Ongoing training will ensure your team is continually evolving their use of Xplan, implementing new features and maximising the return on investment.

Your offboarding checklist

Equally important to setting the team up for success is a solid offboarding process. When a team member leaves, you must have a clear procedure to deactivate or archive their account to protect client data and maintain security.

First, you need to reallocate responsibilities across:

• Clients: Reassign responsibility for all clients.
• Tasks: Reassign all existing tasks, threads, cases, or opportunities. Remember, the Auto Reassign feature only works for new tasks assigned during the user's leave period.
• Templates: Reassign ownership of all templates (task, thread, case, document note, xmerge) and update any Workflow Groups where the user was the Initial Assignee.
• Schedules: Recreate and replace any schedules that they own.
• Data and groups: Update any Managed Field Content that they own, update the owner on any Group Plans, and update Case Benchmarks and benchmark sets. Update the administrator of any user groups where they are listed.

Then, you need to remove access:

• Datafeeds and mail: Remove datafeed adviser mappings and remove the user's email address.
• User profile: Apply an 'archive' or 'terminated' access level to remove all capabilities.
• IressID: Revoke their IressID Access and, as a precautionary measure, set the Expiry Date to today.
• Licences: Cancel licences. Remove the licences and ask Iress to cancel them.
• Third parties: Notify any third parties where the user has been a contact or representative of your practice, such as Iress Connect.

By investing in onboarding, continuous training and using all available resources, you’re empowering your team to operate with precision and confidence, elevating your practice from a simple take-away counter service to a genuine silver service experience.