This article was initially published in French in Bilan in June 2016.
How excelling at managing clients differentiates you?
And differentiates you more than Innovation or Operational excellence?
Do you remember the Little Prince, the rose and the fox?
It is the time you have wasted with your rose that makes your rose so important.
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince
The Little Prince has spent so much time taming his rose that he considers it unique, even amongst a thousand others.
50 years after Saint-Exupéry, Don Peppers explained how the mechanism works in business in his famous book “One to One Future” in mid 90s’.
Innovation is great but can be copied. Operational excellence is great but can be copied. With technology, transparency and speed of information, it can even be discovered and copied faster than ever.
However, no one can copy what you do with the knowledge you have on your clients.
Nevertheless, this knowledge is useless if you don’t do anything with it, if it is buried into Private Banking Central File or lost in translation between Back and Front-Office.
So let’s imagine you are able to transform this knowledge into customized service. Imagine you are able to make it even more personal each time you interact with your client and know his preferences better. Imagine that no matter how and where you interact, at any touch point, you gather more information, remember and increase personalization of next interaction. Imagine how this could look like in reporting or in financial planning for instance.
The more your services are modular, the more you can assemble and customize them, like Lego.
Then you become not only great, you become unique.
Can someone copy you? one could try. But let’s think about it.
How long will it take to develop the same level of personalization? How long will your client take to teach your competitor who he is, what he prefers and how he likes it to be delivered?
If you are great, will your client risk switching to someone else, spending as much time as he spent with you to come up, maybe, with the same personalized service?
Learning relationship + Time + Personalization = Uniqueness
Know you client, spend time to interact, know more at each interaction and make sure the more you spend time, the more you increase your level of personalization,
and you will become the unique rose of your client.
In Private Banking, personalization is the essence: use technology to transform the information you have on your clients into mass-personalized services (reporting, advisory, risk profiling, on boarding…).
Can we apply 1to1 principles to Private Banking?
Actually Private Banking is a 1to1 business.
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