November Edition 2020

32 less opportunity to meet and particularly to meet casually with a greater proportion of people working more flexibly. The ‘let’s grab a quick coffee’ will be less likely and where meetings take place they will necessarily be more formal. In such circumstances a new playbook is going to be required for relationship building. This has some interesting consequences. Clients with less investment in a personal relationship with their advisor are going to be less loyal to them and, consequently, more likely to stray – or at least review their options when the need arises.The personal relationship therefore becomes a smaller part of the whole client loyalty equation and the overall client experience assumes greater importance. What is being driven then is loyalty to the firm rather than loyalty to the person. It is the relationship with the firm, which itself has multiple facets, that needs to be worked on, developed and deeply understood. Experience shows that most firms do not have the understanding they need of the range and depth of relationships that the firm holds. The perennial issues that plague CRM systems, and which firms have put up with for years due to a lack of a viable solution, are really impacting their ability to leverage the totality of relationships the firm as a whole actually holds. Leveraging technology to help surface those hidden relationships that the individuals quite happily hold without ensuring that that information is in the CRM will be key to driving the overall firm level relationship. As important is the ability to monitor this overall relationship over time so action can be taken if this relationship shows signs of weakening. This, in turn, implies the ability to monitor and alert based on defined triggers (i.e. more than a 10 per cent drop in ‘relationship capital’ over a three month period for a particular organisation). The delivery experience With the end to end client experience assuming greater prominence in the future, firms will have to adopt technology and processes to ensure that this experience exceeds expectations rather than simply meets them. It is likely that, as firms respond to the current crisis andmodify their structure in the ways previously described, challenges will appear that will need careful thought to overcome.