The Client Behavior Benchmark was designed by asset managers for asset managers. Through the self-governing User Group you, the asset manager, remain in charge of the benchmark. This gives you access to new tools and data, a safe environment for sharing best practices, and the ability to shape the benchmark’s future. This makes the benchmark self-strengthening and aligned to asset managers’ needs.
Asset managers are late adopters of client engagement
The actions of the long-term forces of supply and demand over the last few decades mean that, for most B2B asset managers, client engagement has become THE reliable differentiator. Thankfully, it is commercial, incremental, and entirely within your control because, at the same time, bargaining power shifted to clients and society digitised. This means the discipline of client engagement is here to stay. is here to stay.
To differentiate yourself through client engagement you just need to start managing it. However, to manage it you need to measure it and this is where the problem arose for asset managers.
Looking after your clients’ precious treasure is not like any other B2B industry and, until now, applicable tools did not exist for asset managers to measure and compare their client engagement. Historically, this has hindered firms’ ability to translate the laudable concept of superior client experience into tangible commercial advantage.
It’s not good enough to compensate for an inadequate situation with tools designed for a different job
Industry discussions are good for getting a general sense of how your internal capabilities compare: how different firms define client engagement, who is responsible for it, and the projects they are running. But without data and tools, they may inadvertently encourage you to herd when you should be trying to stand out.
To compensate for the situation, the industry relied on client feedback. But this inundated clients with feedback requests and caused infrequent, unrepresentative, and low response rates. Furthermore, humans are tricky creatures for whom actions speak louder than words, so to avoid compounding these industry-specific issues, you should not rely fully on client feedback.
This situation magnifies the opportunity for the firms that are determined to master client engagement, but they need help because it is not as simple as applying tools designed for B2C transactions to B2B relationships.
The change needed to solve this problem
To stand a chance of differentiating your company by the experience you give to your clients, you will need three things:
- New tools and data that let you measure and compare your client engagement objectively.
- A safe environment in which you can share best practices with your peers.
- The ability to shape the benchmark’s future to ensure it continues to meet your needs as your clients’ requirements evolve.
The Client Behavior Benchmark's User Group gives you all three
“This is exactly the type of data we've been looking for – clients, markets, and competitors.”
A Head of Analytics and Insights.
New tools and data – a standard measurement methodology provides fresh absolute and relative data every quarter. This means you can measure, compare, and predict your client engagement and its effect on whether clients buy, stay, and buy more.
A safe environment – not only does the User Group enable peer-group discussions fuelled with reliable data, but it also provides the contractual protection that enables firms to share best practices in the general interest of clients.
The ability to shape the benchmark’s future – crucially, the Client Behavior Benchmark is a self-governing utility. This places you in charge of directing the tool, calling for new metrics and analytics, and synthesising new solutions. This creates the opportunity to not only share best practices but also to create them, to keep the benchmark aligned with your clients’ evolving needs, and to continually push forward the leading edge of client engagement across the industry.
“We’re excited at senior levels about this benchmark. We like the structure of an industry utility through which we can shape its future, and we see it as part of a wider objective to reduce our spend on external data by 80%.”
A global head of Client Engagement.
Weighed and measured
At the time of publication, the User Group is directing the benchmark in the global institutional market while exploring the possibility of an intermediary version too.
At the same time, another group of firms from the broader Asset Management CX Forum is defining the moments that matter and target client behaviors across the insurance client journey so we can ensure the benchmark caters for the needs of these clients too.
Stay connected
We hope you enjoyed this article and that it got you thinking about how the Client Behavior Benchmark’s User Group has brought the changes needed to help measure client engagement in the context of B2B asset management.
If you would like to see the benchmark in action, head over to the Client Behavior Benchmark page.
Once there, you can learn about its use cases, watch a video of one of them (keeping your sales funnel wider for longer), and book a demo. To finish where we started: client engagement is commercial, incremental, and entirely within your control.