Case Study: Improving Client Experience in a Private Bank

Situation

• A major private bank knew that the skills of its relationship managers needed to be upgraded.
• Faced with increasing competition from US and European private banks, their goal was to increase retention of clients by improving the client experience skills of their relationship managers so that clients found no reason to consider alternative private banks. 

Our task

To design and deliver a skills development process that included:

• Client feedback to individual relationship managers.
• A set of core behaviours to be applied across all operational locations (Europe, the US and Asia).
• A four-day workshop programme for relationship managers, plus a shorter version for senior managers.
• A process improvement plan to follow the leadership and development initiative.

Action we took

The work broke down into the following stages: 

• Client interviews conducted on the phone, focusing on behaviours expected from an ideal relationship manager.
• 22 interviews with high performing relationship managers.
• Creation of a list of behaviours for the learning design and client questionnaires for individual relationship managers.
• Design and rollout of the relationship manager development programme.
• Running the client survey.
• One-to-one personal coaching during the programme.
• Analysing and designing a continuous improvement initiative.

Results

• The programme was rolled out in 30 4-day workshops delivered in multiple locations over 18 months.
• The bank developed specialist teams focused on one type of client, for example motor racing drivers or football players.
• A high level of client engagement in the process, as they saw the value to them from the improvements and changes.
• High level of retention of key clients.
• Ongoing collection and analysis of data from relationship managers were used to drive a set of improvement initiatives, backed by our facilitation. These positively impacted clients and helped drive client retention.

Project take-away

Smart, high-performance companies continually analyse and improve their operational delivery, using customer expectations to inform better decision-making and change activity.

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