40 years in and still improving: Why Cetera's “pension guy” switched to Zocks

Meet the advisor who’s still keeping score

James Levine recently opened his Zocks Meeting Scorecard and read the verdict: 58 points out of 100, a score that told him there was room to grow. 

He's been a financial advisor for nearly 40 years.

Most veterans would bristle at software grading their client meetings, but James loves it. “Yes, I've been doing this for 40 years. It keeps changing, and I think I can continue to get better. You can always do it better,” he says.

James is known across Cetera as “the pension guy.” Qualified plans make up about 60% of his book with 60 to 70 pension clients, plus hundreds of individual households averaging $750,000 and climbing. He runs it all from Long Island with a team spread across the country: his assistant, Alicia, in Connecticut; his partner, Rob, in Scottsdale, Ariz.; and clients nationwide. In a typical week, he's talking to 20 to 25 clients personally, about 50 across the team.

The challenge: inaccurate speaker attribution and privacy concerns with Jump

James initially tried Jump, “but I find Zocks is better,” he says. Two things drove him to switch: Jump often got speaker attribution wrong, and recordings were an issue.

Matching the right person to the right voice is especially important in trustee meetings, which are often large, information-dense meetings where decisions and responsibilities need to be accurately documented. Getting the speaker wrong can have significant consequences through everything that follows. 

The second issue was recordings. With Jump, the audio recordings “seemed to be there forever”. James didn't want a permanent recording sitting behind every meeting when the important points were already captured in writing.

Another challenge with his pension-focused practice: Larger plans require audits, and detailed notes rarely come from the client side. Smaller plans often have no HR department at all, so a once-a-year meeting can generate an extensive task list with no internal team to track it. As new business continued to come in, that work was pushing the firm toward capacity, and James didn’t want the answer to be simply hiring more people.

The solution: accurate, audit-ready notes, routed to Redtail

With trustee meetings as the centerpiece, Zocks accurately handles speaker attribution across a room full of trustees, eliminating the need to manually select, or later correct, who said what. 

Zocks was “much better than Jump in assigning who’s saying what to the right individual, which is a big deal,” James says. 

And after every meeting, James forwards the notes and action items straight to the plan's auditors. 

“Auditors love what I can send them after a meeting,” he says. The smaller plans benefit just as much. Zocks “makes sure that we are handling everything that needs to be handled.”

Everything that Zocks captures automatically routes through Redtail CRM. “Redtail's our life,” James says. Meeting notes land under the right client, and tasks get divided between Alicia and Rob with a clear view of what's been done — which matters when your team is spread across the country. Even one-on-ones with individual plan participants get logged, so the team remembers every conversation across hundreds of relationships.

Lately, his most-used feature is Document Intelligence. He drops a 27-page estate planning document into Zocks and gets back a one-page summary, attached to the client record in Redtail.

The results: 10 hours back and a prospecting edge 

James estimates Zocks has saved up to 10 hours a week and cut client servicing time by 25%. This has led to more business with the same headcount, solving the exact capacity problem that sent him looking for AI.

It's even become a prospecting edge. When he asks pension prospects what audit-ready notes their current advisor provides, “the answer, 95% of the time, is none.” This benefit instantly becomes a selling point.

Then there's the scorecard. Zocks tracks his talk time, client sentiment, and which topics he covered (or forgot). “Sometimes I forget to bring up annuities, and that's been a large part of my business,” he says. It also catches when he talks too much: “It's basically saying, shut up a little and listen.”

After 40 years, his conclusion is blunt. “If you have a lot of clients — which most of the people I know do because they've been doing this forever — there's no way to keep on top of everything you need to do without a system like Zocks.”