Client outreach

Office anthropology™ →Go uptown File:Client outreach.png The JC puts on his pith-helmet, grabs his butterfly net and a rucksack full of marmalade sandwiches, and heads into the concrete jungleIndex: Click ᐅ to expand: Work anthropology Tell me more Sign up for our newsletter — or just get in touch: for ½ a weekly 🍺 you get to consult JC. Ask about it here.

A mass-communication of something important — “importance” being in the eye of the beholder — to your whole client base. How a firm does this is a measure of its commercial sophistication, first, and its technological sophistication, second.

The usual means of client outreach is to get a dedicated client outreach team — there will be one, somewhere in the operations stack — to handle it by mass-market mailshot. If so, the die is cast: you have already taken the wrong path and it is too late to change. Take this as commiseration, consolation, and fortification to intervene earlier next time.

Client outreach is spam

First thing to note: from a “client’s” perspective, any client outreach, at best, is spam. At best.

In most cases, you will be outreaching to advise (i) of some forthcoming regulatory change to your own operation with a peripheral impact on the client, and what you plan to do about it; or (ii) some snafu in your systems meaning you have transgressed some technical regulation; or (iii) an internal policy disclosure point which some bright spark in the risk management federation has dreamed up and decreed needs to be urgently notified to the world at large.

Is it really that important?

The professional managerial class’s structural self-obsession is such that it sees its own role as a sacred calling of utmost importance to the future safety and good order of the political economy itself. It must do, to be able to sleep, given the absurd rent it extracts from that same political economy.

Middle managers do not so much have trouble seeing the wood for the trees, as understanding there is a wood at all. “All there is this tree. My tree. The one with many thin branches, supporting many fat birds, like me.”

Through this prism, well insulated from the realities beyond the tree’s crown, that one sees only once a client communication crosses that threshold and goes out into the wide world.