BLOG. 2 min read
Staying competitive in 2020 and beyond requires precision and excellence—the insight to understand exactly what your customers need and the focus to tailor all aspects of the customer experience to meet those needs, from the products you offer to the way you engage with your customers.
Great customer experience requires operational alignment across distribution and marketing teams; yet, according to our 2019 survey of asset management Chief Marketing Officers, the number one stated challenge in improving customer engagement was better alignment between sales and marketing on shared strategies and objectives.
Everyone in the firm who interacts with customers must unite behind a customer-centric strategy. However, while it’s critical for firms to strive for structural alignment, good customer data is key to aligning the customer engagement across the sales and marketing organizations. By adopting a data-driven approach to prioritizing customer relationships, businesses can identify the best opportunities for business development and long-term profitability, while optimizing individual experiences.
Optimizing engagement requires firms to know their customers through and through. As it pertains to asset managers, a critical starting point for firms distributing their product in the intermediary retail market is advisor segmentation. Operational and actionable segmentation starts with prioritizing engagement via the intersection of influence, value and opportunity (IVO) data points. Once those metrics are established, life-stage segmentation will hone the action plan based on the advisors past, current and potential future relationship with your firm. This allows firms to obtain greater precision in their engagement plan and design and deliver more personalized experiences.
Additionally, customer opportunity scoring adds another layer of critical information. Beyond basic lead scoring, customer opportunity scoring ranks customers based on a multitude of real-time metrics. This allows asset managers to focus on the best customers rather than the best leads, and aim for higher customer lifetime value (CLV) over near-term sales.
Finally, customer experience isn’t just about sound data and technology. Asset managers need a method to measure, rank and tier their high-priority institutional relationships (i.e. broker/dealer home offices) in order to align their human resources behind their most important relationships. SS&C’s Radar for Assessing Distributor Relationships (RADR) framework provides a structured and objective way for National Accounts, Marketing and Sales to work together to identify and prioritize relationships by ranking, tiering and formulating an optimized engagement strategy for each of their distributor relationships.
For a more in-depth discussion on the alignment of a firm-wide customer engagement strategy, as well as what other tools and considerations can help you maximize business development and long-term profitability, download the full report: Moving the Needle with Customer Experience: A Pathway to Sustainable Growth.
