We’ve heard plenty about “experiential marketing” and the way providers strive to create economic value and competitive advantage by managing the ways we sense, feel, think, act, and relate to their brands. It’s effective. Think about the satisfaction you feel as you pull away from the service experience at a Chick-Fil-A window, for example, versus other fast-food purchase experiences so heinous they lead to tempers snapping or customers and employees verbally assaulting each other.
It’s time we apply the principles of customer, brand and product leadership to the accounting experiences we create and drive among our clients, practitioners and managers. Think about it: Beyond death and taxes, the most predictable aspect of accounting is perpetual change. In just the past 18 months, we’ve navigated (some better than others) cryptocurrency, new laws and technology, deadline shifts, technology downtime, expectations of clients, the Paycheck Protection Program, the Employee Retention Credit and the forced changes resulting from COVID.
Change management is “forever” in the realm of accounting services. The firms that are winning now are embracing change in effective ways. By doing this, they are able to avoid the cataclysmic disruption experienced by those who fail to manage change well.
Now, beyond change management, is the phenomenon we call "Accounting Experience Management." This concept is grounded in the fact that effective execution and delivery of every accounting deliverable is about more than what you do — it’s also how you do it, and how it is perceived, experienced and measured.
This form of experience management creates both subjective and objective value in the eyes of clients, practitioners, managers, vendors, and all other stakeholders. Everything within the virtuous cycle of efficient workflows, meaningful reporting, accurate financial results, and ideal recommendations and deliverables comes down to a single focus — satisfaction. On all sides of the process, delight can make its way to the very fabric of the client-provider relationship.
Breaking up with SALY
In the realm of “how you do it,” consider the problem of breaking up with SALY — the stubborn tendency of many in accounting to cling to the inertia and comfort of doing things “the same as last year.”
When your focus is experience management, you don’t support complacency or the formation of self-interested factions among your partners and teams. Instead, you actively manage the process of change by embracing and celebrating the positive aspects of what you did before. It served a purpose. You chose the process and solutions you chose for good reasons. But like saying goodbye to Father Time to make room to usher in the New Year’s Baby, you should acknowledge the good in your prior process and tools and celebrate their denouement as you evolve from what worked then to what works better now.
One of our favorite customers at Avii holds a mock wedding when they incorporate new technology with the old, and a graduation party when they remove an old solution from the mix to make room for something better. Team members will remember the gesture and will view the transition as natural and positive instead of an indication of who’s favorite software components won and who’s familiar go-to technology lost.
Imagine the possibilities when we make the experience of the work and the results as big or even bigger an objective within your key performance indicators than the output specifications we achieve. Managing your teams and designing your process with experience management in mind will lead to new and better priorities and decisions.
Where do we start?
Start by uplifting the parts of your workflows and technology mix that impress and please your clients. Then, evolve something that improves the experience of your practitioners ... perhaps automating the time and billing functions that have traditionally resulted in a level of wasted time and practitioner stress. Then look for ways to improve the experience for your staff when managing processes or people. Perhaps you reduce or eliminate the number of disconnected software solutions in your technology arsenal, enabling your firm to leverage more actionable data to ultimately enjoy richer real-time KPIs and dashboards.
Adopting these three focus points of AEM will lift your success and satisfaction of all stakeholders. Best of all? When you elevate the way everybody experiences your practice, you’ll be raising your efficiency and profitability, too.
