News
Differentiate through client experience
Accomplish has had a great year! We have helped asset managers develop in-house CX measurement capabilities that have enabled them to differentiate through client experience. Read on to learn about the new BI tool that has made this possible, our objectives for next year, and how you can leverage these developments to establish your firm’s CX measurement capability in 2022.
Helping asset managers differentiate through client experience
Asset managers now have in-house CX measurement capabilities
Early adopter firms spent 2021 working with Accomplish to design the CX Touchpoint Benchmark.
Collectively, we have built a best practice tool for B2B client experience (CX) in the investment industry through which all participating firms have developed in-house CX measurement capabilities. Some achieved this all at once, while others did so incrementally.
As the end of the year approaches, these firms can now measure, compare, and predict their CX through observations of their effects on their clients’ behavior.
Because they have many clients and can measure their behavior without disrupting them, they are contributing statistically valid data to the benchmark. This is important because it ensures the representativeness of any insights the benchmark yields.
We are excited that these developments have transformed B2B asset managers’ CX from being a laudable concept into a tangible, commercial and controllable discipline. In the words of a Global Head of Client Services, “now our teams across the business can see CX in a tangible form, they have really engaged in the topic.”
The powerful combination of CX and BI
A client’s journey through your organisation is end-to-end and so is the discipline of business intelligence (BI).
Being able to measure your effect on clients across all the moments that matter on your client journey provides a new aspect to BI that places the client centre stage. It also means the CX Touchpoint Benchmark is as much a BI tool as it is a CX benchmark.
The participating firms have been quick to spot this, with their BI teams being as equally involved as their CX specialists. One firm has even brought CX and BI together under the same senior manager.
Differentiate through client experience
“What gets measured gets managed” and the primary reason for managing the experience you give to your clients is to stand out from all the other suppliers of investment services in ways that are hard to replicate.
But differentiation strategies evolve all the time, so to achieve this you need to know how you compare on an ongoing basis.
To make this possible, the benchmark refreshes quarterly. This places firms in command of the latest data and able to respond to fresh insights in an agile way. Or, as one Head of Analytics and Insights put it, “this way of thinking is going to help us transform our business.”
How we did it
We combined behavioral analysis, segmentation, and user control – of all the unique features of the CX Touchpoint Benchmark, three stand out as having been critical to its early success:
- Behavioral analysis – humans are tricky creatures and, on its own, client feedback will contain gaps and inaccuracies. In contrast, behavioral data is objective, general, and universal so you can use it to counteract the weaknesses of client feedback. The Accomplish benchmark has filled the gap in the market for a behavioral benchmark and now gives firms the complete story about their client experience.
- Segment-specific client journeys – some aspects of your client journey will matter to all clients, while others will matter more to some and not at all to others. We addressed this by creating segment-specific versions of the benchmark, e.g. institutional, advisory, wholesale, etc.
- The asset managers are in charge – each version of the benchmark has a user group that directs the metrics, shares best practices, and synthesizes new solutions in response to insights that emerge from the benchmark. From our perspective, it is the perfect way of ensuring we deliver what asset managers want. From their perspective, “working with the User Group to align on metadata helped us develop our CX measurement capability” and “it is a safe place for my peers and me.”
The Helix© is a best practice taxonomy of CX metrics – crucial to any comparison is the consistency of the underlying measurements. To achieve this, we created the Helix© taxonomy of CX metrics. It breaks down a client journey into the moments that matter, identifies the behaviors you want to stimulate in your clients, and defines the associated CX metrics. We think the Helix© is pretty nerdy, but a Head of Business Intelligence was kind enough to call it “the cheat sheet that everybody wants.”
We planted 562 trees along the way – achieving all of this was not easy and we could not have done it without the unwavering support of the participating asset managers. In terms of Accomplish’s own client experience, a key behavior we track is our clients coming back for more and, when they do, we plant trees in their local states, departments, counties, etc. Because of this, our favourite indicator of our own clients’ behavior is the number of trees we have planted. And this year has been a great year!
Our objectives for next year
Looking ahead to 2022, we intend to go further and faster. Specifically, we have plans to:
- Double the depth of our behavioral dataset.
- Broaden it into the advisory, wholesale and insurance segments.
- Launch an online analytics platform.
- Run a programme of best practice discussions for our User Groups.
- Plant an additional 1,000 trees.
Do you have an annual objective for CX?
We are encouraging asset managers who want to differentiate through client experience to leverage these developments by setting themselves an annual objective for 2022 to develop their own CX measurement capability.
If this idea interests you, check out your options for engaging with the CX Touchpoint Benchmark and get in touch if you have any questions – we would love to hear from you.
