Who Owns the Client Relationship at Atlas Assurance?
Atlas Assurance has nine business relationship managers (BRMs), each aligned to a region, plus a central IT organisation with service owners for 22 services. A separate customer success team supports a new SaaS claims product. When a reinsurance client suffered a two-day claims-portal outage, three different Atlas people contacted the client: the BRM, the service owner, and a customer success manager. The client's COO complained to Atlas's CIO that 'nobody owns our relationship'. The BRM says the service owner controls all changes and communication; the service owner says the BRM owns the business relationship and should have informed the client; the customer success manager says the product is outside the BRM's scope. Complaints are logged by the service desk but not shared with BRMs. The CIO wants a RACI model and a single point of contact for top-20 clients within 30 days, without adding headcount.
1. Using the scenario, allocate relationship responsibilities across the BRM, service owner, customer success manager and service desk. Identify where the current confusion lies.
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The confusion is a role-design problem, not a personality problem. The BRM should own the client relationship: stakeholder mapping, engagement, satisfaction, voice of the customer, escalation coordination, and the account plan. The service owner should own end-to-end service performance: SLAs, changes, technical communication content, and service improvement. The customer success manager should own product adoption and outcomes for the SaaS claims product, but must align with the BRM so the client sees one relationship, not two. The service desk should own intake, logging, resolution, and closure confirmation, and must share complaint data with BRMs. In the outage, three people contacted the client because no RACI defined who coordinates communication. The BRM should coordinate the client conversation, drawing on the service owner for technical facts and the customer success manager for product context. The service owner's claim to own all changes is valid for change control, but not for client relationship communication. The service desk data gap means BRMs are blind to early warning signals.
2. Recommend an organisational and governance model to deliver a single point of contact for top-20 clients without adding headcount. What are the trade-offs?
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Keep the existing BRM headcount but introduce a federated model with a central practice owner. For each top-20 client, designate one lead relationship owner - usually the existing BRM - who is accountable for the relationship and coordinates all communication. This is a single point of contact, not a single communicator. Publish a RACI covering BRM, service owner, customer success, and service desk, and an escalation matrix with timeframes. Establish a weekly client risk review and a shared CRM record. The central practice owner sets standards, stakeholder mapping, and reporting, while regions retain local knowledge. Trade-offs: central standards reduce duplication but may slow local decisions; the lead role adds workload without headcount, so remove duplicate reporting and clarify that service owners no longer contact the client directly without coordination; customer success may lose direct access, so define its scope by product outcome and require joint account planning. Executive sponsorship is essential because the conflicts are structural.
3. What competencies and behaviours should Atlas develop in its BRMs, and how would you assess them?
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Develop competencies in empathy, active listening, communication, negotiation, conflict resolution, business acumen, stakeholder analysis, and data literacy for voice-of-the-customer work. Behaviourally, BRMs should be proactive, curious, honest about problems, and collaborative with service owners. Assess through 360-degree feedback, client feedback, quality of stakeholder maps and account plans, engagement coverage, and escalation resolution times. Use scenario-based interviews for recruitment and development. In this case, the BRM should have known about the outage and should have had a relationship with the reinsurance COO before the complaint. Development should include shadowing service owners to understand technical constraints, and customer success staff should learn account planning. Create a community of practice for relationship roles so lessons are shared. Avoid generic training days; use real client cases and coaching. Measure behaviour change, not attendance.