In brief
Client engagement is about stimulating the most important client behaviors and converting one into another. Develop a competitive advantage by leveraging patterns of client behavior at the ‘follow-through’ points on the client journey.
The goal of client engagement
Client experience (CX) is an ‘effect’ you ‘cause’ that manifests itself in what clients say (feedback) and what they do (behavior). While feedback is qualitative, behavior is a definable, observable, and quantifiable way of monitoring CX.
Specifically, ‘engagement’ is a category of behavior that you can subdivide into individual actions. Some client behaviors may be insignificant, while others will be meaningful indicators.
The goal of a client engagement function, therefore, is to develop strategies for stimulating the most important client behaviors across the sales funnel and client journey and for converting one behavior into another.
Most behaviors will be ‘gifts of time’, such as how they reacted to receiving your emails, their actions on your website, and whether they progressed to more advanced (in-person) engagements like attending an event or requesting a meeting.
Three of them – the Big 3 – will involve transfers of money: did they buy, did they stay, and did they buy more?

Follow-through behaviors
What we have said above matters because if you underperform at engaging clients, they will, by definition, give more of their time to your competitors than to you, creating the risk that their money will follow.
At Accomplish, we advise asset managers to focus on what we call ‘follow-through behaviors’: actions that escalate a client’s level of engagement and advance their position in your sales funnel.
For example, clicking on an email takes them from their inbox to your website – from passive awareness (opening your email) to active engagement with your content for a few seconds or minutes. These days, clicking on a link requires trust in you (the sender), so do not overlook this small behavior or under-estimate how hard you may need to work to gain their trust.
Another example is what we call the podcast listen-through rate: actually listening to a podcast they have downloaded. On average, this follow-through multiplied their engagement x5 from about 3 minutes spent on your website to 15 minutes dedicated listening time. This is a big shift in their behavior.
Or maybe they attended one of your investment events and, in so doing, ‘crossed the Rubicon’ from minutes of often anonymous digital engagement to hours of in-person engagement. This is another significant increase in engagement and is an important leading behavioral indicator at a crucial stage of your sales funnel. So, now that they have followed-through, what is your strategy for converting this behavior into another one, e.g. a follow-up meeting with a relationship manager?
Leverage patterns of client behavior
Fairly soon after you start measuring, you will spot the patterns of client behavior that tell you the levels of engagement that the different parts of your sales funnel stimulate. Once you know this, you can develop all sorts of valuable capabilities:
- Fine-tune your a/b testing and evaluate the performance of different campaigns against data-driven targets.
- Identify your superfans who regularly exceed the average level for your follow-through behaviors, e.g. those who almost always click on your emails or attend your events.
- Crucially, you will also be able to identify and respond to changes in behavior – either at an aggregate level (maybe your videos or events begin to lose popularity) or at the individual level (perhaps a superfan stops engaging).
The third use case is particularly significant because individual behavioral changes can serve as a red flag for a potential client at risk, or conversely, a green light for a sales opportunity. In either scenario, the relationship manager will want to know.
The winners will develop a competitive advantage
Much of this data will already be in your systems, so the winners will be those who develop the capabilities needed to translate it into a competitive advantage.
Because you will have limited management bandwidth, getting this right will require you to focus on just the critical client behaviors.
And that’s where the Client Behavior Benchmark helps.
Participation gives you immediate access to the data dictionary of the most valuable client behaviors and how to measure them. And the quarterly comparison against other asset managers gives you the incentive to monitor your own data, explore these insights, and respond fast.
Alternatively, you may forego monitoring this data altogether. This could leave you operating under the assumption that what you do is competitive, when, in fact, others may be far outperforming you or evolving in ways that you are not expecting. While your eye is off the ball, you will miss out on valuable insights that may include opportunities for improvement and chances for your competitors to get ahead of you.
3 steps to CX excellence
We hope you found this article about how you can leverage patterns of client behavior useful. If you would like to act further, here are Accomplish’s 3 steps to CX excellence:
- Book a personal tour.
- Check the readiness of your CX data.
- Pinpoint, in time and money, where your CX out and underperforms at engaging clients.