Role
Account manager
What do you not know about your client until they call to terminate? Usually everything that happened between contracts - tickets, conversations, promises not kept. It sits in four systems and in the memory of several people.
Intro call
Four questions we would start with
Losing a client is almost never sudden. It is only suddenly noticed. The questions below are there to establish what could have been seen earlier.
What do you not know about a client until they tell you themselves?
If you do not know how many tickets they raised, how fast they got an answer and what they did not buy this year, then the renewal conversation starts with you asking "so how is the cooperation going".
What stays in the company when an account manager leaves?
The client list always stays. The question is about the rest: arrangements that were never in the contract, promises made a year ago, knowing who really decides on the client's side.
How quickly do you find out that something went wrong?
The ticket goes to service, the invoice to accounting, the complaint to customer service. The account manager learns about all three at once - at a meeting that was meant to be about expanding the cooperation.
When do you decide to start the renewal conversation?
If it is a month before the date, it is a conversation about price. If it is six months earlier, it is a conversation about what you have built together. The same conversation, held from two completely different positions.
We take over assembling the picture, you keep the relationship
Collecting the history from the systems, catching risk signals and preparing the material for the conversation is done by the machine. The conversation, the reading of the situation and the decision what to propose stay with the account manager.
- We do not enter the relationship with the client. - The system does not write to them and does not call them. It assembles the picture and raises its hand when something looks worrying.
- A risk signal is material, not a verdict. - A drop in orders can mean the client is in trouble or that it is their low season. The person who knows the company tells the difference.
- The picture of the client is assembled from your systems. - Orders, tickets, payments, correspondence - no guesswork and no data you do not have.
Scope
What can be taken off account management
Twenty example tasks. Each one has a human approval point. Below is a selection, and the scope we fit to your process.
The picture of the client before a conversation
- A summary of the cooperation: what they buy, since when, at what pace
- Tickets and response times over the recent period
- Payment history and delays, with no interpretation
- Commitments to the client arising from the contract and how far they are delivered
- Changes at the client's company - people, structure, public announcements
Risk signals
- A drop in orders against the client's own history (reading of the cause: the account manager)
- More tickets, or response times getting longer
- No contact for longer than agreed for that segment
- A change of decision maker on the client's side
- A request for quote that did not end in an order
Preparing a renewal
- A renewal calendar with the lead time set for that segment
- A summary of what the client has actually used out of the contract
- Material for the conversation: what worked, what did not, what we propose (the content of the proposal: the account manager)
- The history of price concessions granted to this client
- A reminder about notice periods and contract terms
Expansion and handover
- Products bought by similar clients but not by this one
- Client enquiries that went beyond the current contract
- A complete pack for handing the account to someone else
- A list of contacts on the client's side with their roles in the decision
- A summary of the year of cooperation as material for a review meeting
A day's work
Today
- Before a meeting you assemble the picture of the client from four tabs and your own memory
- You hear about service tickets from the client, not from service
- You remember the big renewals, the smaller ones remind you themselves, usually too late
- You do not know what the client is not using out of what they pay for
- Taking over an account from a colleague means a week of asking questions
- The renewal conversation starts by asking how the cooperation is going
With AI assistance
- The picture of the client is waiting, assembled, with links to the sources
- A worrying ticket reaches you in the week it was raised
- The renewal calendar reminds you with the lead time set for that segment
- You can see what the client uses and what lies untouched - and that is material for a conversation
- Taking over an account means reading one page
- The conversation starts with something concrete, because you have it in front of you
- Predictable renewals
the date is known in advance, not in the last month
the renewal calendar is a process, not the account manager's memory
- Early warning
a signal from service reaches the commercial side
events from different systems meet on one client
- Continuity of the relationship
a change of account manager does not reset the cooperation
the history of arrangements is recorded outside one person's head
- Consistent service
smaller clients get the same standard as the largest
preparation stops depending on who there happens to be time for
We start with one client segment, not with the whole portfolio.
- Step 1
We assemble the picture of one client
We take one real client and assemble by hand everything you know about them, from every system. That single page shows how much work goes today into something the account manager should always have at hand.
- Step 2
A client page for one segment
The picture assembled automatically for a chosen group. No signals, no warnings - first the picture alone, so the team builds trust in it.
- Step 3
Risk signals
We add the warnings, starting with one, the least ambiguous. Every warning that turns out to be a false alarm we fix or switch off - an alarm nobody believes is worse than no alarm.
- Step 4
Renewals and handovers
The renewal calendar and the handover pack. Only here, because both rest on the picture from the earlier steps being complete.
Common questions
Questions that come up at the first meeting
How is the system supposed to know about a chat over coffee at a trade fair?
It has no way of knowing and it will not. That is why the account manager's note stays part of the picture of the client - only written down right after the conversation rather than reconstructed in the evening. What nobody writes down will be lost exactly as it is now.
Does the account manager not become redundant once the system knows the history?
The system knows events, it does not know the client. The contact history is there so that the account manager does not have to reconstruct it before every conversation, not so that the conversation stops happening. In practice what changes is the number of clients one person can genuinely look after without someone dropping out of sight. That is a wider portfolio, not a smaller team.
Does this fall under the AI Act?
Supporting the management of business accounts is not a high-risk use - nobody is being assessed here in a way that has consequences for them. The point to watch is contact data: the usual rules for processing it apply.
Still have a question that is not here? Book a call
Next step
When did you last lose a client you thought was perfectly fine?
We will show you what looking after a portfolio looks like when the picture of the client assembles itself and signals from other departments arrive in time.