October 19, 2021 | Stamford, CT — Faced with increasingly fast and complex markets and constrained by budget limitations, asset owners are asking their asset managers for insights, advice and enhanced levels of service. Asset managers are responding by enhancing client centricity to retain and attract clients in an increasingly competitive market.

“To meet these demands, asset managers are working to create new models that allow them to deliver superior service and to partner with their best clients as strategic advisors,” says Davis Walmsley, Head of Client Relationships at Coalition Greenwich and author of Client-Centricity: Building a Strategic Advantage through Superior Service. “But client-centricity is not easy to achieve, and it does not come cheap.” 

Focusing on the “Right” Clients
Asset managers can address increasing margin pressure by more effectively allocating scarce resources. By targeting prospects that best match their offerings, managers can increase sales efficiency and elevate client satisfaction rates — all while minimizing costs to serve. Coalition Greenwich’s persona modeling, which uses proprietary data on institutional attributes and behaviors to identify investors’ preferences for engagement, is one approach to segmenting clients and prospects. 

Asset managers should also be assessing and ranking the lifetime value of clients in terms of total available wallet and possible growth, and tiering clients in terms of fit and potential. 
In a tiered model, lower-priority clients receive scalable, lower-touch service, while high priority clients receive support, insights and other forms of value beyond the bounds of any individual investment mandate. 

Asset managers are also seeking to improve client centricity through the hiring of dedicated client-experience professionals. 

“Client-experience professionals are often the only people in a firm focused on the entirety of the client’s journey, from awareness to termination, and across functions like sales, investments and client service,” says Davis Walmsley. “As a result, they are well-positioned to work across the organization, aligning and coordinating resources to eliminate pain points and ensure a consistent and superior client experience.”

Client-Centricity: Building a Strategic Advantage through Superior Service highlights approaches to implementing a truly client-centric strategy, including monitoring and measuring service quality, staffing the client experience and creating strategic partnerships with top clients. The report also looks at how asset managers can elevate service through persona-based segmentation techniques.