Case study: align your BI with your business strategy

Case study: align your BI with your business strategy

Is your business intelligence (BI) fit-for-purpose?

The Behavioral Benchmark yields commercially-actionable BI that leading asset managers are using to solve real-world problems.

This case study is one of a series that demonstrates the value of embedding client behaviors into your targets, strategies, and business planning.

The problem – in their own words

“Client retention is crucial to our business plan, yet we couldn’t measure it. Our strategic objectives for next year are to retain our existing clients and to grow by deepening our relationships with them. However, we faced an immediate challenge: we had no measure of client retention. Added to this, we had no industry comparators for either client retention or relationship depth, and we were concerned about not knowing if our numbers were any good or not, yet alone setting targets that could be either too easy or too hard.”

Accomplish’s response

Both metrics this asset manager needed are ‘output’ client behaviors – retaining clients is about ‘staying’ and deepening relationships is about ‘buying more’.

So, we were able to provide the calculation methodologies from the taxonomy that all firms in the Behavioral Benchmark use.

Straightaway we encountered another problem: in recent years, they had implemented a new billing system, and their Finance department did not have the start date of every client relationship.

We had seen something similar before, so we dug our User Group notes for information about how some firms were also sourcing start dates from their CRM systems. Eureka! This worked. We have other proxies too, but they are not relevant to this case study.

We also persuaded the asset manager to take a step back: client tenure and relationship depth are difficult to stimulate directly. What, was their plan? And what day-to-day client behaviors could they target and measure to help them influence the outcome?

They planned to engage clients with thought leadership e-mails and follow-up events. They would then focus on converting these types of engagement into targeted meetings and requests for pitches. The benchmark also measures these ‘input’ client behaviors, so now they can measure progress towards their objectives as well as monitor the performance of their underlying strategies for stimulating specific behaviors in clients.

Results

In their words

“We are now measuring client tenure, relationship depth, and key aspects of our various strategies for achieving them, e.g. marketing, sales, and service … and we are doing so in a way that we can compare against our peers. This helped us set informed targets, which we customised after seeing that clients behave differently in different regions. And while it seems so obvious, our strategy now drives our BI making it richer and keeping it fit for purpose.”

In Accomplish’s words

Staying for another quarter (client tenure) and buying another product (relationship depth) are crucial client behaviors, so we are delighted that this firm can now monitor their contribution to its game plan.

We are also pleased they benefited from the best practice definitions the User Group of ‘early adopter’ asset managers developed for the different types of client behavior.

Lastly, whether a firm is joining the Behavioral Benchmark or has been in it for a while, helping firms align their BI with their strategies is all part of our service. We do this because we want asset managers to understand their effect on their clients’ behavior and because it only makes sense to measure the things that matter. What matters changes over time so, if you do not periodically re-align your BI, you can end up walking around with your head in the clouds.

A series of behavioral benchmarking case studies

We hope you found this case study useful. It is part of a series that demonstrates the value of embedding client behaviors into your targets and strategies. Here are the other topics:

  • Align your BI with your business strategy.
  • Improve your sales conversion.
  • A scientific approach to client tenure.
  • Annual plans now include client behavior targets.
  • Discover your weaknesses before clients tell you.

Book a demo with Adam if you would like to know how your firm could measure, compare, and predict its effect on client behaviors like buying, staying, and buying more. After all, actions speak louder than words.

Adam Grainger

Adam Grainger

Behavioral analytics | Business intelligence | Asset management

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