Welcome to our blog series that explores the unique features of the Behavioral Benchmark.
Three characteristics make it a unique business intelligence tool for asset managers and ensure it delivers vital insights about your effect on whether clients buy, stay, and buy more.
In this article, we explain one of them: its use of segment-specific client journeys.
Don’t compare apples with oranges
Some aspects of your client journey will matter to all clients, e.g. issue and query management, while others will matter more to some and not at all to others.
Obviously, this is because different types of clients have different needs. For example:
- Gaining market share with pension funds may be easier if you first cater to the needs of their investment consultants.
- Getting your funds onto an intermediary’s platform means providing them with data in the way they need it.
- Making inroads with insurance clients will require you to be able to anticipate their specific reporting requirements.
As a result, the moments that matter to a client will depend on their segment. So, if you want to measure the most important client behaviors, you will need to do so in a segment-specific way. If you are not ready for this, you may end up comparing apples with oranges and all the problems that brings.
Many client journey initiatives fail to make a difference
To solve the problem, you need end-to-end journeys that are relevant to the client’s needs, explainable, and measurable.
But this requires a lot of work and is not often how we see firms addressing this topic. In fact, we often see the opposite with the approaches below being some of the most common mistakes:
- Client journeys for tiers, rather than segments – a journey for each of your (let’s say) gold, silver and bronze client tiers will be irrelevant to many clients because, for example, an insurer needs a different experience to a pension fund regardless of their importance to you. As a result, this approach leads to high levels of customisation.
- Too complicated – in this scenario, we see lots of detailed architectural maps that gather dust quickly because they are hard for staff to remember and almost impossible to convey to clients.
- Limited practical application – lastly, we see client journeys that fail the ‘so what?’ test. CX is an ‘effect’ in your clients that you cause, so what behavior will they display that will indicate whether you have had the effect you wanted? And how will you find out? Without ongoing measurements, a client journey may end up being an academic exercise.
It doesn’t have to be this way.
Segment-specific client journeys
A collaboration of asset managers designed end-to-end journeys for institutional and intermediary clients – designed for asset managers by asset managers.
Each journey focuses on the behaviors asset managers want to stimulate in clients at the moments that matter. Imagine about 30 metrics, rather than 200. This allows you to see the single thread that weaves its way through your organisation from start to finish – your client. Or, in the words of one of our clients, “Well done! Now I can see the forest for the trees. Thank you for not just throwing in every possible metric and seeing which ones stick.”
The journeys support each moment that matters with target client behaviors and corresponding metrics of the ‘effects’ you will want to stimulate, observe and measure. This brings you vital business intelligence, for example:
- Buying – your sales conversion rate of successful RFPs into revenue?
- Staying – for how long do they stay loyal to you?
- Buying more – how many products or mandates does your average client purchase?
Further, because you can measure the experiences you give to your different client segments, you can learn lessons from the differences between them.
Just get started
Pull the Helix© taxonomy of asset management client behavior metrics off the shelf, start measuring right away, and gain peace of mind that your data is clean through Accomplish’s quality checks.
The most successful adoption strategy is to give initial focus to output client behaviors – the strategic dollarizable metrics that indicate your effect on whether clients buy, stay, and buy more.
This will develop your ability to measure client behavior that you would be able to roll out more broadly if you ever wished.
You will also be able to explore your findings with Accomplish’s specialists at data interpretation sessions, and exploit the power of the benchmark’s User Group.
This flexibility allows you to develop your firm’s measurement capability at your own pace.
Weighed and measured
In H1 2021, the core design group of firms proved the benchmark in the EMEA institutional market. We have since rolled out a full-strength version to the Americas and Apac and are building the data series that will power its predictive capability.
The intermediary version is following in its footsteps with a pilot in the North American advisory market before we will take it global too.
The full series of blogs
We hope you enjoyed this article and that it got you thinking about your different types of clients and how you can measure client behavior as the reliable indicator of demand.
The remaining blogs in the series will each investigate in detail one of the unique features:
- Behavioral analysis
- Segment-specific client journeys
- Exploit the power of the User Group
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