For the most part, the public could assume that accountants only deal with numerical values. Tax professionals certainly spend a lot of time thinking about and dealing with money, but there’s more to the work than that.
Client service is an overlooked but vital component of any successful accounting firm.
The Importance of Client Service
All of your customers, no matter what kind, share a basic trait: they are human. No customer-facing position is complete without service-related duties, even if they aren’t explicitly stated as such.
Like any other occupation, customer service influences the decision to do business with you, impacting the duration of your connection. HubSpot discovered that if a company has great customer service, 93% of customers will buy from them again. Yale researchers also discovered that happy customers are likely to recommend their friends and family, which is the best kind of advertising since it brings in new customers without spending a dime.
If you want your clients to have a good experience, you must invest in customer service. To help any tax practitioner stand out, try the tax envelopes for your client’s returns. We’ve compiled a list of seven strategies.
1 Understand who you’re speaking to.
Even while many professionals deal with a diverse clientele, each one likely has unique interests, expertise, and experiences that make specific topics more pertinent to them.
We provide financial data in numerical form, but to understand them, we must also construct a narrative around those statistics, as pointed out by Jenny Rush, CPA and controller at Help Scout. Being able to take complex ideas and explain them in a manner that everybody can understand is more complex than mastering the craft’s technical components.
2. Establish goals and strive to achieve them.
In nearly every profession, miscommunication about expectations can lead to problems. When you consider the inherent sensitivity of dealing with someone’s money, everything is already high-stakes.
To better understand your client’s expectations, you might incorporate some targeted questions into the questionnaire. A few possible questions to consider are:
- What was a positive aspect of your former accountant’s work?
- In what ways could they have improved their performance?
- Which do you value more: a detailed answer or a fast one?
- How soon do you think you’ll hear back when you contact them?
After you get the information, you can sit down with the customer and write an informal agreement. Then, you can put it in their file for future reference. At the end of the year, you might send out the agreement and ask your clients for input on how you did according to the boundaries of the agreement if you want to delve deep.
3. Take the lead in communicating.
After working in the same industry, you could start to believe your clients know more than they do. Proactive communication is crucial because, even though something is common knowledge in the field, assuming everyone is equally knowledgeable might lead to disastrous results.
People are grateful when you alert them to upcoming deadlines or compliance items.
If you learn that a client may be affected by an upcoming change in legislation, you may inform them about the change and offer them advice on how to be ready, for instance. It demonstrates your active engagement with their account and could prevent a lot of hassles if you have that information early on.
4. Analyze your progress.
Your service should be subject to the same rigorous auditing standards as your client’s financial records. Several options are available to you for accomplishing this:
- Be sure to ask those you’re helping how you’re doing; it’s one of the finest ways to get feedback. To gauge your progress, consider sending out a satisfaction survey at the end of the year or every three months. Alternatively, you may schedule meetings with a select group of clients and use that time to solicit their opinions.
- Make it easy for customers to rate your service by having them write a review and then post it on a platform like Google My Business or another forum. Several vendors on the marketplace offer review automation solutions.
- Review the metrics. A reporting feature is probably there if you’re utilizing a support desk or a comparable tool. Most of them keep tabs on things like the average time it took to reply to a request, the average amount of time it took to fix the problem, and the average number of messages sent.
Any approach will do, but a combination is ideal. Using multiple sources gives you and your clients a fuller picture.
5. Make changes as needed.
You can’t win at customer service; that much is true. There is always an opportunity for growth, regardless of your current level of competence. What will make you unique is your willingness to make such improvements.
Listen carefully to comments and suggestions and devise concrete solutions to resolve any issues raised by customers. Some things may be too much for you to handle—well, that’s fine. Determine which areas can make the most difference and devote your efforts there.
In the end!
Customer service shouldn’t take a back seat to anything else just because it isn’t the most talked-about issue at your company. If you disregard your customers, who are essential to your company’s survival, they will go elsewhere.
Invest in the work you’re doing, and don’t rush it. Do not be shy about asking for input; instead, seek resources to improve matters for all parties. Just like with anything else, you will get out of it what you put into it. Your sincere efforts will be rewarded in due course.