Key point summary
If 1) you define client engagement as ‘time given’ plus ‘money spent’ and 2) you underperform at engaging clients, by definition, they will give their time to your competitors … and then their money too.
This makes client engagement a vital battleground.
To help you prevail, the Client Behavior Benchmark lets you:
- Discover, in time and money, WHERE you out and underperform at stimulating institutional client engagement.
- Learn HOW to outperform at engaging clients while also giving them a superior experience.
The asset management client engagement benchmark, therefore, will help create winners and losers and, indeed, a new wave of asset managers is now joining. For our part, we are currently offering a free trial for those who want to explore their business case now in preparation for 2025.
Featured by the experts – across April 2024, the UK Investment Association’s FinTech accelerator featured the Client Behavior Benchmark, and we are delighted to have established an exclusive partnership with Baringa Consulting.
1. Client engagement is a vital battleground
Time is your most precious commodity, and you cannot be in two places simultaneously. As a result, you probably guard your time jealously – bouncing off websites after only a few seconds and not ‘wasting your time’ on those who run aimless meetings.
Instead, most of us ‘vote with our feet’: we give more time to those we expect or want to play a part in our future, and less to the others. Furthermore, if we don’t give someone our time, we won’t give them our money. Therefore, ‘time given’ is a leading indicator that we will spend money.
That gives us the definition of client engagement: time given + money spent.
For example, if you underperform at engaging clients, by definition, they will give their time to your competitors … and then their money too.
And this makes client engagement a vital battleground.
2. Win the battle for client engagement in 3 moves
A new wave of asset managers is now joining the Client Behavior Benchmark and, across the new and existing firms, there is a 3-move pattern of behavior:
Move 1: capitalize on your client behavior data – engagement is a category of behavior and behaviors are comparable, ‘nudgeable’ and dollarizable. To track institutional client engagement, therefore, you must measure your effect on client behavior, such as email engagement, digital engagement, and in-person engagement. To interpret and manage your results, you must compare them against other asset managers who also serve institutional clients and have used consistent measurements. As a result, you may learn, for example, that while it felt like clients were hot for you, they were actually hotter for someone else, or vice versa. The client behavior data you need for this is already in your systems: for some firms, it is organized and ready to go; for others, it is buried and fragmented. Regardless, the winners will capitalize on it.
Move 2: convert ‘gifts of time’ into ‘transfers of money’ – a ‘gift of time’ (like visiting your website or attending an event) can lead to a ‘transfer of money’ (like buying) and you can influence the conversion rate. To prove this, imagine you wanted your email, digital, and in-person engagement to underperform, and now think of the guaranteed ways of making them fail. Similarly, there are proven techniques for converting one behavior into another. However, if you only focus on absolute engagement (e.g. the highest event attendance) rather than your conversion rates from one behavior to another, you may achieve good engagement but it may lead nowhere.
The winners, therefore, will develop strategies to convert gifts of time into transfers of money and they will do this despite internal organizational boundaries. Marketing and sales teams will work together to promote and sell, and service and relationship teams will do the same to serve and retain clients. Why? Because the main alternative is inferior and brings disabling disadvantages.
Move 3: compete for time as well as money – in the same way as there is only so much money clients can allocate, there is also only so much time they can give. Because of this, asset managers are in a zero-sum game with each other – not just for clients’ assets but also for their time. The winners, therefore, will compete as intensely for time as they do for money.
3. The asset management client engagement benchmark
The Client Behavior Benchmark was purpose-built to be THE asset management client engagement benchmark. It is a unique set of institutional data that lets you see ‘snapshots in time’ and multi-year trend analytics. At Accomplish, we believe will help create winners and losers.
Check out the screenshot to see how the Benchmark breaks down ‘engagement’ into its constituent behaviours, for example:
- Gifts of time – nudgeable leading behavioral indicators like email engagement, digital engagement, and in-person engagement, plus some essential service delivery metrics.
- Transfers of money – strategic and dollarizable lagging indicators like buying, staying, and buying more.
The outcome? A new era in which asset managers can now discover, in time and money, WHERE they out and underperform at engaging clients. Fully informed, you can develop strategies to convert gifts of time into transfers of money.
4. Helping create winners and losers
You do not have to participate in the Benchmark – the choice is yours – but a new wave of firms is now joining. For our part, Accomplish is currently offering a free trial for those who want to explore their business case now in preparation for 2025. If you are interested, explore the use cases in detail and contact us to discuss your options. For ease, we have summarised them here into two main categories:
- Manage your institutional sales funnel and end-to-end client journey holistically – quantifying your client engagement lets you leverage your strengths, pinpoint your weaknesses, develop response plans, and set balanced targets.
- Widen your sales funnel for as long as possible – being able to see, in visualizations, the importance of converting the client behavior you are responsible for into those ‘owned’ by the next team (aka combating client leakage) brings 3 major advantages: 1) it knocks down those silo walls, 2) it strengthens links across organizational boundaries, and 3) it brings obvious commercial benefits for your firm by keeping clients and prospects active in your sales funnel rather than letting them ‘leak’ out.
Lastly, but by no means least, discovering WHERE you underperform raises an obvious question: how can you outperform? Because behaviors are nudgeable, behavioral science has a contribution to make here too and so Accomplish’s playbooks will show you HOW to outperform at engaging clients in the context of institutional asset management.
5. Who else rates the Benchmark?
Featured by experts – across April 2024, it was Accomplish’s privilege for the IA Engine – the UK Investment Association’s FinTech accelerator – to feature the Client Behavior Benchmark in its emails, videos, and social media posts. Plans are also taking shape for deeper collaboration in the coming months.
Strategic partnership with Baringa – we recognize that some asset managers may need support, whether with organizing their data or with developing and implementing strategies to respond to their benchmarking results. We are delighted, therefore, to have established an exclusive partnership with Baringa Consulting. This gives you, the asset manager, access to specialist advisors who understand behavioral benchmarking data and who have a ‘hotline’ relationship with Accomplish’s behavioral and data scientists.
If the Client Behavior Benchmark feels right for your firm, nudge your Head of Distribution, Distribution COO, or Head of Client Engagement / Insights to research it here and book a demo so they can see it in action. Act now if you want to join the new wave of firms entering the Benchmark: we will not offer the free trial forever.
