Client outreach
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Office anthropology™
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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, one is well insulated from the realities beyond the tree’s crown. The self-involved rarely perceive the reception their communications will get once they cross that threshold and goes out into the wide world.[1] If you are lucky, this will be studied indifference.
So first, ask: do we really need to communicate this to clients? Will the sky fall in on our heads if we do not?
Is bulk email the right way to do it?
Assume that, despite robust challenge and respectful escalation to the head of compliance the conclusion remains that yes, this really is significant enough to draw to every client’s attention. Then ask: okay, that being the case, do you really want to do that by spam? Now here the size and public orientation of your business will be determinative. If you are a retail bank mailing six million people about a change to the terms and conditions of their current accounts, then absolutely you want to be doing this by spam. The more spam-like the better. The main objective of client outreach to retail clients is to say, “look, I tried”.[2]
If you are an investment bank, your clients will pay you revenue in the hundreds of thousands or millions a year. If something is important enough to tell a million dollar client, it is worth doing in person. Have your sales people call. This is called relationship management.