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Accomplish – The Asset Management CX Specialists
Our mission
Accomplish’s mission is to improve the experience clients receive from the investment industry.
This is important for clients because a poor experience can stimulate emotional reactions when investors should keep a clear head and make unemotional decisions about their financial futures.
It’s important for asset managers, too, because if your CX excels systematically at avoiding outflows, your increased client retention will show in your average client tenure, which is your largest source of revenue.
How we achieved this goal
To achieve this, we needed to convert client experience (CX) from being a soft, fluffy, and ill-defined concept into a tangible, measurable, and dollarizable discipline through which we could help firms see where they had out- and underperformed.
How the story unfolded
The first thing we needed was collective action, which is not the easiest place to start. However, we used our network and Adam’s experience running CX transformations to establish the Asset Management CX Forum that, at its height, comprised 32 firms.
Its purpose was to provide the industry-level R&D needed to confirm the problem, convince firms to act, and develop a solution that asset managers would not only recognise but also own and maintain as techniques evolved over time.
It was classic R&D: at the outset, we did not know what the solution would be (if we would even find one). Looking back, some of these research projects were dead ends, but we only know that now because we invested time into finding out. Who remembers the ‘CX Kite Mark’? Hopefully, no one [authors blush].
But then it happened: in the July 2020 CX Forum, as we discussed the findings of the latest research into ‘voice of the client’ initiatives, one asset manager said, “Well, if ‘what clients say’ isn’t the answer, how about ‘what they do’?”
That was the lightbulb moment: to excel at CX (not just be good at it), asset managers would need a trusted and independent neutral party to run a benchmark.
And so the Client Behavior Benchmark was born which, at the time, we called the CX Touchpoint Benchmark. And Accomplish set its strategy to be a pure-play benchmarking firm that would create unconflicted insights, data-driven hypotheses, and actionable recommendations.
Lastly, our command of a dataset that has become a feature of the industry landscape also allowed us to use a ‘utility-style’ pricing model that encourages long-term relationships. This makes the insights “high ROI stuff” for the asset managers; their continued engagement is good for clients who gain an ever-improving experience from the industry, and it’s good for Accomplish because our dataset has grown nicely.
Our values
Perhaps because, at the outset, we did not know how we would achieve our goal, the one thing that has remained constant is our values. Early on, we agreed that, no matter what direction we took, we wanted these attributes to influence our reputation:
- Purpose-built through research.
- Command of the latest data.
- Relevant, brief, and gone.
As we approach our sixth birthday (in 2024), these are no longer aspirations but phrases we can now substantiate with tangible products, specialist insights, and CX success stories.
