The Problem
A wealth advisory firm's advisors were drowning in inbound client email. Deposits, withdrawals, RRSP and TFSA contributions, EFT requests, tax slip asks, general admin — every email had to be read, classified, routed, and turned into a CRM task by hand. Across five advisors and ten mailboxes (each advisor has both a firm-side and a dealer-side inbox), the volume was eating hours per advisor every week.
The other risk: when an inbound request was incomplete, the back-and-forth to get the missing info from the client was inconsistent. Some clarifications happened same-day; some sat in inboxes for days.
What We Diagnosed
The classification problem was tractable: 7 task types covered the vast majority of inbound. Each had a defined set of structured fields the Client Success team needed in order to act. The harder problem was incomplete requests — the system needed to do more than triage; it had to draft the clarification reply in the advisor's voice and thread it back into the conversation correctly.
We also designed for the regulatory layer up front: PIPEDA / PIPA audit trail on every event, append-only logging, and 90-day data minimization on email bodies.
What We Built
- Microsoft Graph integration monitoring all 10 advisor mailboxes across both tenants
- Classifier that sorts inbound into the 7 task types and extracts structured fields per type
- Python-side completeness validation — LLM output never trusted as source of truth
- Complete requests: routed to the CRM as tasks, picked up by the Client Success queue
- Incomplete requests: system drafts a tone-matched clarification reply using the advisor's voice samples; advisor reviews and approves; reply sent from the advisor's own mailbox with proper threading
- Full audit trail on every event for compliance review
The Results
| Metric | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Advisor time on email triage | Multiple hours/wk | Minutes/day |
| Time to first response on incomplete requests | Days | Same-day |
| CRM task quality | Variable | Structured + validated |
| Compliance audit readiness | Manual to assemble | Continuous |
Roughly 5+ hours per advisor per week back — but the bigger win is consistency. Every client email lands in the same shape, gets the same treatment, and shows up in the CRM ready for action.