Even the most attentive client relationship managers may occasionally let an opportunity pass them by. MeridianAI can ensure that valuable insight on client needs is never truly lost, writes Bertie Heppel at Meridian West.
Like all things in business, client listening programmes must provide a return to justify the investment. Yes, improvements in client experience offer their own rewards, but a truly successful programme is one that identifies and capitalises on cross-selling opportunities. As markets become more saturated and client expectations continue to rise, firms that can proactively understand and address their clients’ evolving needs will have a significant advantage. This is where Meridian AI comes into play, offering a powerful tool for uncovering hidden opportunities and driving growth through data-driven cross-selling.
What’s in your blind spot?
Cross-selling can only happen when client relationships are cultivated; firms hoping to offer solutions to their client’s challenges must understand them first. But the relationship between a firm and a client organisation is often not held across one single touchpoint, but a complex webwork of individual interactions.
Drawing a common theme across this tangle is no easy task. No client relationship manager can have eyes on the entire business, and even the best come with their biases and blind spots; in law firms, a corporate transactions specialist may miss opportunities that a litigator would notice; valuable context may be missed, and opportunities may not be shared between practice areas. What’s more, client expectations are heightening, with businesses of all stripes coming to demand an ever-more proactive mindset from all of their service providers.
Understanding client needs at a deeper level
Meridian AI’s advanced natural language processing and machine learning algorithms allow firms to gain a deeper, more nuanced understanding of client needs. The tool can analyse vast amounts of data from various sources, including formal client interviews and surveys, informal conversations and meeting notes, industry reports and news, client financial data and operational metrics, and historical service engagement data. By synthesizing this information, Meridian AI can identify patterns and trends that human analysts might miss.
This depth of insight allows firms to anticipate client needs, sometimes before the clients themselves are fully aware of them. Instead of waiting for clients to make the first move, Meridian AI can proactivity identify cross-selling opportunities, helping firms identify emerging challenges in a client’s industry, spot gaps in current service provision, and recognize patterns that indicate potential for new services.
Most crucially, this proactive approach not only helps firms identify new opportunities but also positions them as strategic partners rather than mere service providers.
Enhancing, not replacing, the personal relationship
Relationship management is a personal business, and any tool worth its salt supplements the all-important human relationship rather than looking to supplant it. MeridianAI was designed with this in mind: rather than simply identifying opportunities, it helps firms tailor their cross-selling efforts to each client’s specific situation. The tool’s ability to provide hyper-personalized insights allows firms to craft targeted pitches that address specific client pain points and time cross-selling efforts to align with client business cycles.
Kirsty Shenton , Head of Client Care at Mills & Reeve , has experienced these benefits first-hand: “The truly exciting prospect is the ability of the Meridian West AI platform offers to create hyper-personalised insights that allow firms such as Mills & Reeve to not only shape its strategy but give its people the all-important insights that support business development.”
This level of personalization significantly increases the chances of successful cross-selling, as clients are more likely to engage with offers that directly address their unique challenges and goals.
Catching up to the opportunities
The prodigious rate at which AI has progressed in recent years has left us with some catching up to do. Current use cases only scratch the surface of what could be possible when smart tools like MeridianAI are paired with deep data and habituated users. We see a future in which firms that are willing to proactively mine all their data for opportunities – not just interview transcripts – will be able to spot and act on opportunities at a much faster rate.
We want to see an enterprising BD team make the most of this tool to become even more sophisticated in their ability to identify and facilitate cross-selling opportunities. The technology can form the basis for predictive modeling that forecasts client needs before they arise; paired with proposal generation tools for faster response to opportunities, we can envisage a future where the lead time between a client’s enquiry and them receiving a proposal is hours, not days.
Firms that crack this will do more than just increase client retention and grow revenue – they will have a unique position on the market, differentiating themselves as forward-thinking, proactive partners.
Bertie Heppel is an Associate Director at Meridian West.
