In brief
How easy is it for your C-suite to oversee client experience (CX)? Accomplish’s new Asset Management CX Scorecard lets them monitor “how clients behave at every stage of the journey and whether you achieved good outcomes for them.” #ConsumerDuty
Are you flying blind on CX?
CX is an ‘effect’ your company ‘causes’. You can observe your effect in what clients say (feedback) and what they do (behavior). Feedback is qualitative while behavior is quantitative – measurable along the pre- and post-sale experience in either time or money.
Senior executives at medium- to large-sized asset management firms typically oversee the performance of the most important aspects of their businesses via a quarterly scorecard. As an indicator of CX, many of these scorecards feature a ‘voice of the client’ score that summarizes the latest client feedback.
However, client feedback will always contain gaps and inaccuracies and is not available frequently, so for much of the year this data point can be stale, which impedes its usefulness. As a result, senior executives responsible for CX can be left ‘flying blind’ on this crucial aspect of their business strategy.
Are your executives able to engage with CX?
In contrast, client behavior data is complete and accurate, measurable without disrupting clients, and is already in your systems.
Because of this, the firms in the Client Behavior Benchmark track the performance of their CX every quarter, which enables executive oversight.
Until now, this has only been possible via the Benchmark’s client journey (see screenshot) that lets you discover where your CX has out- and underperformed.
This tool has key advantages:
- Mutual interest – because behavior is measurable in either time or money, if your CX underperforms at engaging clients, they will give their time to your competitors … and then their money. This creates a mutual interest in providing an outperforming experience for clients.
- Regulatory compliance (in the UK) – it lets you monitor “how clients behave at every stage of the journey and, at these stages, understand and evidence whether you are achieving good outcomes for clients.” As well as making good business sense, the eagle-eyed among you will also recognize this as a Consumer Duty obligation for firms that operate in the UK.
But as senior executives move quickly through a pack of papers, it is not always easy for them to engage with so much detailed information, reducing the oversight they can exert in practice.
Introducing the Asset Management CX Scorecard
To solve this problem, Accomplish worked with the Benchmark’s users to create the Asset Management CX Scorecard – a new summary view of client behavior at every stage of the journey and the outcomes achieved.
At a glance, your executive committee members can see where their pre- and post-sale CX out and underperformed and how it is trending over time.
If a finding catches your eye, you can drill through into the client journey for more information and again into an analytics layer that provides insights, hypotheses, and recommendations for each underlying client behavior.
Focus on evidence-based priorities
By flashing red in the screenshot above, consultant relations and client reporting will attract attention immediately. But what do the numbers mean? To interpret your scores, think about the S&P Global Purchasing Managers’ Index:
- 50 = average, >50 is above average, and <50 is below.
- 100 = highest scoring firm in the Benchmark.
- 0 = lowest scoring firm.
And if your broader management information framework only has limited space, the new CX scorecard gives you both an overall score. In the screenshot, it is ‘52’ – as well as summary scores for your pre- and post-sale CX – 65 and 38 respectively.
What can you achieve with this?
- You can educate your senior executives that CX is a tangible discipline that they can monitor and evidence.
- You can help them engage practically by evidencing the firm’s strengths that they may wish to leverage and its weaknesses that they will probably want to fix. This C-suite support is vital because the cross-functional nature of CX means that resolving issues often needs changes to be driven across multiple parts of the business.
- You can focus the firm’s attention and resources on the time and money clients give you and incorporate responses into your CX design, targets, and monitoring.
New features deliver more value
We hope you found this article about the new Asset Management CX Scorecard useful. This is one of the new features we’re planning for the Benchmark in 2024/25 as part of our strategy to use leading-edge R&D to unearth new and dollarizable client insights for asset managers:
Our other goals are to:
- Launch an ongoing wholesale / intermediary CX benchmark.
- Conduct one-off research into ‘focus funds’.
- Develop a framework for minimizing client leakage from your sales funnel.
- Deepen our existing institutional benchmarking to client portals.
We look forward to keeping you up to speed on these developments too.
In the meantime, if you would like to learn more, check out the Client Behavior Benchmark and our 3 steps to CX excellence.