Tax season: Time to make your clients happy

Loyal customers are five times more likely to make repeat purchases and four times more likely to refer a friend to your firm.

That statistic, provided by Forbes, gets to the heart of why you need to spend more time creating and delivering on a unique experience for clients. There is no better time to focus on making clients happy than during tax season, when you will see a high percentage of them in a short window of time.

While you need both, your client experience and your client service are not the same. Creating a client experience comes down to uniform, intentional actions you take that are unique to your firm that influence your customer’s impression of working with you. Ultimately, the client experience is about how you make a client feel about your firm and its professionals at every interaction.

No one of the steps below constitutes a client experience program. However, they are single steps that get you further along in the process than you were without them. And they may just translate into additional revenue later. With so much current and potential revenue from existing clients at stake, why not use this busy season to launch small activities that accelerate your impact on client engagement? The client experience is too important to your future success to ignore.

Business development during the busiest time of the year is hard for most people and, as a result, too many accountants don’t put much effort toward it. While convincing someone to attend a networking event in March may be an uphill battle, encouraging a focus on clients is an easier sell. To help you see how easy a focus on your clients can be, there are seven ideas below that your firm may consider implementing.

1. Ask one question

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Identify one or two questions to have your team members ask every client they talk with. Be sure the answers to these questions are inventoried somewhere. A customer relationship management system is a great solution for this but a simple Excel document works, too. Focus on questions that will help you improve your service offerings or lead to advisory services. This could be asking about what technologies they use so you can work on building out custom CAS offerings later. Or you could ask if they have been contacted about buying or selling their business since you last spoke, so you have a target list of those who may need help navigating succession planning issues.

2. Say thanks

Write a personal message that you send to your client contact, copying their manager, thanking him or her for helping you, and sharing how their efforts improved the process for you. Your input could have a resounding impact on your contact’s current and future assignments and evaluations. This simple gesture of gratitude says to your client that you appreciate them and value the business relationship.

3. Introduce a team member

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Use this time to suggest that the client meet with someone else in the firm for a conversation. This works best when the introduction is to someone who offers advisory services. Position it as a way to compare notes on what they are seeing when it comes to mergers and acquisitions in their field, enhancements to financial reporting or how to strengthen a relationship with their lending/bonding company — whatever ties into your advisory offerings. This way you aren’t selling anything, but if there is a way to help this client, your advisory partner can identify it and can work with you on next steps.

4. Ask for introductions

Consider the variety of people in your client’s ecosystem you could benefit from knowing, like those in functional areas like IT, operations, HR and sales — stakeholders who can help you identify other advisory services that may benefit the client. A simple ask now opens the door for potential post-tax season meetings to explore their priorities and how your offerings may align with those priorities. Also consider external introductions to your client’s other trusted advisors like bankers, lawyers, insurance brokers, etc. This is a savvy way to expand your influence with those who serve your clients while expanding your network of people who can refer work to you.

Introduction requests could include potential clients, too. When considering who you want to meet, remember it’s those like-minded contacts or businesses who can benefit from the services you or your firm provides. You have to have the courage to ask, but this is easier when your contact just had an excellent client experience.

5. Share an article

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As you are talking to your clients, they will likely share some sort of pain they are feeling. In a lot of cases, this may be in an area outside your expertise — something like staffing problems, managing remote employees, identifying mental health issues in others, supply chain issues, etc. Yet you can still demonstrate how well you listened by sending an article that deals with the topic. Ideally, this would be an article written by your firm, but that’s not a necessity. Any article on the topic with a note that you thought of them creates a positive impression. Searches of your website or the internet make this relatively easy and not time-consuming.

6. Ask for reviews

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Most prospects today will search online to see what others have to say about you before giving you a call. Boost your online reviews by asking clients who like you to leave you a review on Google, Facebook, Yelp or a site of your choosing. Clients do this to express their gratitude toward you. If they express hesitation, it opens the door to a broader conversation about the service you provide and what, if any, improvements are needed. Personal asks are best, but you could also work this into your client communication or tax return delivery process.

7. Survey clients

The best time to ask someone what they think of your service is when you deliver the service. This could be done with each tax return, at some regular interval like weekly or, minimally, after the deadline. Sending the survey alone is not enough. You need a plan for how you’ll come together as soon as possible to review the data and take actionable steps to improve on what you do. The key to this sort of survey is a single question: How likely are you to refer us to others? The answers allow you to calculate your net promoter score — a key client loyalty and client experience benchmark used to measure and improve the client experience.