Client outreach

Office anthropology™ →Go uptown 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 to your whole client base. How a firm does this is a gauge of its commercial sophistication, first, and its technological sophistication, second.

The usual means of executing it will be to get the dedicated client outreach team 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. See this post as commiseration, consolation, and fortification to intervene earlier next time.

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 of (i) some forthcoming regulatory change, and what you plan to do about it; or (ii) some snafu in your systems meaning you have transgressed some technical regulation; or (iii) some disclosure point which some bright spark in the risk management federation has dreamed up and decreed needs to be urgently advised to the entire world.

Is it really that important?

It is a function of the professional managerial class’s structural self-obsession 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, in order to be able to sleep, given the absurdly large rent it extracts from that political economy. Middle managers do not so much have trouble seeing the wood for the trees, as crediting that 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 shadow that one sees only once a client communication crosses that threshold and goes out into the wide world.