How do you eat an elephant - Managing a large number of clients relationships?

I was chatting with the division head of large bank recently and the topic of how they managed customer relationships when there are a significant number of customers, over 2000, over a number of countries.

An interesting challenge but not that uncommon. Although the implementation will vary from organisation to organisation (and individual to individual) it will boil down to a Client Relationship (Accounts) Plan.

We are not talking about a plan to reactively respond to queries or even regular reports, though these might make up some element of it. We are talking about proactively managing and building the relationships in a define, measured and repeatable way.
It will be a project, starting with Requirements (what do the business want from better relationships, what does success look like, etc), then a Proposal (here's how we think we can achieve it) and then the Plan (including costs, tasks, deliverables, schedule and quality measures).

So how does this relate to African riddle of eating an elephant? Just like the elephant, you must break the project into bit size pieces and give yourself enough time to do (eat!) them all. The typical time frame is going to be one year (contract renewal cycle) so your plan should address what you will be doing each month, week and day to "eat that elephant".

With the requirements of the business established how do we prioritise which clients need what level of attention? With your Client Relationship Plan you now have a communication document to share with the sales team, account managers, marketing, HR, Service Desk and the clients themselves. With this invaluable feed back you can agree a sensible and achievable strategy with the business.

As for that division head with the 2000 clients, he has adopted a multi-channel approach the centre piece of which is a Centre of Excellence (The Lab). This honey pot technique can be very affective but we'll have to wait and see how well it works