What is client experience for asset managers?
The long-term forces of supply and demand have shifted the bargaining power to clients, causing many asset managers to promote the outperformance of their client experience (or CX) as a strategic differentiator.
There is a lot of material available on the general concept of CX, but much of it assumes a transactional relationship with a B2C customer. Yet B2B CX is different and asset management is unique in being a relationship-based industry that involves clients handing over their precious treasure.
This raises immediate questions: what is client experience for asset managers, and what constitutes outperformance?
This article, therefore, will help you answer these questions by exploring CX from the specific perspective of the asset management industry.
It is based on lessons Accomplish learned from chairing the global Asset Management CX Forum between 2018 and 2021, and from our subsequent support for the CX teams who participate in the Client Behavior Benchmark that lets asset managers discover where their CX out and underperforms.
What is not CX?
Let’s start with what is not CX, why not, and why avoiding these common pitfalls matters.
1. CX is NOT fuzzy intentions, warm words, or even a one-off project
CX certainly includes art: clients must be comfortable with your brand, you must make them look and feel good, and because we all forget ordinary experiences we recommend you ‘sprinkle unexpected delights’ to ensure your CX stands out.
But this success will not happen by chance – it requires prior planning and measurable execution. It also requires ongoing management to ensure your CX remains competitive as your peers evolve and try to outperform you. This matters because your success will show in your numbers – in your digital and in-person engagement scores, service delivery results, and in your all-important sales conversion, client tenure, and relationship depth.
As a result, CX is a measurable discipline and to outperform consistently you must develop an ongoing capability.
2. CX is NOT the same as Client Service
In most asset management firms, the Client Service team is responsible for the daily fulfilment of client queries and requests. In others, this team’s responsibility is defined more broadly as ‘post-sale services’.
While these activities are crucial parts of the client experience, a coherent client journey comprises the efforts of many more teams from around the organization, e.g. digital engagement, client reporting, and relationship management. This means that both commonly adopted remits for client service teams are narrow, yet the scope of CX is broad.
This matters because in our experience if an organization allocates CX as an extra responsibility to an operational team, in busy times when teams prioritize their efforts, they will focus on their core function at the expense of coordinating the flow of the strategic client experience.
CX, therefore, is a cross-functional coordination task.
3. CX does NOT begin with onboarding
Thirdly, you may be tempted to define CX as being just the post-sale experience: it is easier to manage a smaller scope of activities and there is an argument that clients only become clients after the point of sale.
But this way of thinking has an important disadvantage: it wrongly assumes that a client does not need exposure to your pre-sale digital and in-person marketing. Yet, if you want to retain clients and cross-sell to them (key measures of CX), you will need to continue to promote yourself to them.
The scope of your CX function, therefore, should be end-to-end, spanning the pre-sale and post-sale experience.
What is CX?
Now let’s pull together what we have learned about client experience for asset managers and add some more definition to it.
1. CX is an ongoing capability
Specifically, CX is an ‘effect’ your client journey ‘causes’ that manifests itself in what clients say (feedback) and what they do (behavior). Feedback is qualitative (e.g. voice of the client surveys) while behavior is quantitative – measurable along the client journey in either ‘gifts of time’ or transfers of money:
‘Gifts of time’ are leading behavioral indicators:
- Reading, watching, listening, attending, and returning.
- Requesting a proposal.
- Consuming your services.
Transfers of money are lagging indicators:
- Buying – sales conversion rates.
- Staying for another year – client tenure.
- Buying another product – increased product-per-client ratio.
Action – the purpose of your ongoing capability, therefore, should be to design, monitor, and manage a coherent CX that stimulates a consistently outperforming behavioral effect in your clients:
- Pre-sale experience – keep your sales funnel as wide as possible for as long as possible.
- Post-sale experience – lengthen your client tenure and deepen your product-per-client ratio.
If every quarter, clients engage with your brand and buy your products in greater proportions than your peers, stay for longer, and buy more, then you should look forward with confidence to the next time you gain their feedback. See here for more on the relative merits of client behavior vs client feedback.
2. CX is a cross-functional coordination task
A typical Distribution Leadership Team / Client Group comprises the heads of product, marketing, sales, and client service, plus a distribution COO and a head of client insights.
Success from the client’s perspective will be a seamless journey as they progress across team boundaries – with one team sometimes delivering a promise made by a different team. From your perspective, success will be about converting one client behavior into another and, therefore, minimizing client leakage from your sales funnel or client journey.
Action – to coordinate your CX across all these areas and their underlying teams, institute a stand-alone CX team (or combine it with one of the other cross-functional areas) and give it authority to coordinate the pre- and post-sale experience.
3. CX is end-to-end
CX is the single thread that weaves its way through the pre- and post-sale processes that your marketing, sales, and service teams deliver.
Every client interaction (known as a ‘touchpoint’) is potentially in-scope, from the moment a prospect becomes aware of you, through selection and onboarding, to every post-sale interaction, until offboarding, when the client becomes a prospect again.
Action – everyone who supports the client’s journey should take responsibility. This is important because if your CX underperforms at engaging clients, they will give their time to your competitors … and then their money.
3 steps to CX excellence
We hope you found this article about client experience for asset managers 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 pre-sale client experience out and underperforms at engaging clients.
