It's not about answering their calls and doing what you promised you would: Sarah Dobek of Inovautus Consulting explains why firms should elevate their client experience.
Transcription:
Dan Hood (00:03):
Welcome to On the Air with Accounting Today. I'm editor-in-chief Dan Hood. Given the war for talent, there's a lot of focus these days on how firms treat their employees — but there's not as much focus on how they treat their clients. Here to talk about why that might need to change and why accounting firms should spend more time on their client experience is Sarah Dobek; she's the president and founder of Inovautus Consulting and a well-known consultant to accounting firms. Sarah, thanks for joining us.
Sarah Dobek (00:22):
Thanks Dan for having me. Happy to be here.
Dan Hood (00:25):
And this is a super timely topic. We know that some, I won't call 'em advanced firms, but maybe advanced firms, go ahead, I'll call 'em, that are thinking a lot about their client experience, but I don't know that every firm is, maybe we should for certain level setting purposes. When we talk about client experience, what do we mean by that?
Sarah Dobek (00:42):
Yeah, that's a great question, Dan. I love it. The way that we describe client experience is sort of twofold. One, we think about your brand as an extension of how you live it. And when we think about how you live it, it's often the touch points that your clients or employees are having with that brand. So it's the softer things. It's how you make clients feel, it's how you communicate with clients. It's all of those touch points that encompass the work that you do with them in their interactions with you at the end of the day.
Dan Hood (01:17):
Got you. I think it's interesting, but it's clear, part of that is philosophy, right? It's the culture and it's communicating that through the practicalities. I think a lot of people look at client experience and they think, oh, it's deliverables, or it's making sure I'm on time and that kind of stuff. But it's also that sort of expressing your firm's culture in everything you do and every interaction with the client. So it's a little bit broader than just the, oh, do we make sure everything got delivered on time, kind of thing. Yes. Excellent. Alright, so why does this matter? Why is this important for firms to pay attention to?
Sarah Dobek (01:46):
Yeah, it might seem like a silly thing right now because a lot of firms have probably more clients than they're able to effectively serve. We see this whole trend around client calling and all of that. But I think one of the reasons it matters is that business is so transient today and a lot of firms want to hang on to their really good clients. And despite the fact that firms have bandwidth, they are still looking to grow. And there are some very aggressive firms out there that are wanting to pick up clients. And so it is not uncommon when I started in this profession, I just remember firm after, for me, we've had these clients for decades and there's this feeling that they don't really go anywhere. We'd be working on the third generation of the family. There was a lot of loyalty 20 plus years ago that was still available in the market and that's just not the market today.
(02:40)
It's all changed. And not to say that you won't have loyal people because you do have loyalty people, but that loyalty has to be earned and it doesn't look like just reacting today, just delivering whatever you promised to deliver in some sort of timeframe without communicating what that is. And so we hear a lot of firms that are like, yeah, I'm really great at client service. I totally respond when the client reaches out to me and we give a great quality service, and that's fantastic and expected. At the end of the day, nobody's going to hire you and expect that you're not going to. Although we hear a lot of clients that are just grateful that they get calls back from their C P A firms in some sort of a timely fashion because it doesn't happen a lot, a lot because of those bandwidth challenges. So the reason that we need to be thinking about this is despite the fact that we feel like we're at bandwidth now, the experiences that people are having with our brand will stay with us for a very long time. The same with our employees. And so if we are not really paying close attention to this, we are going to risk our brand and our reputation in the marketplace with how we're handling things currently and will impact what we look like in the future.
Dan Hood (03:54):
And as you say there, soon as one firm starts thinking about it, that creates a competitive cascade. There are some very aggressive firms that are very into their client experience and expressing it to clients. There's also a lot of competition coming from outside the profession that wants to strip away clients. So as loyal as they may be, you definitely want to make sure you keep a hold of 'em. The other thing, we were talking on an earlier podcast, we've been talking about the move to advisory services and advisory services. Well, we talked a lot about the selling of them, but they're very different from compliance. It's very easy to say, I'll just go with the guy who did my tax return or the guy who did my audit. We know big four firms have been auditing the same client for 127 years or something like that.
(04:32)
It's a lot easier to say, well, we've finished with this consulting or advisory engagement and that's the end of our relationship. A lot of them are sort of one-offs or much more easily broken off than a compliance engagement. So making sure that you're doing something special and communicating that to clients seems to make a lot of sense. You talked a little bit about what the client experience well, what the lack of a client experience looks like in the sense of yes, I answer their calls when they call me, or yes, we do the work we promised to do, which seems to sort of a bare minimum table stakes kind of thing. But what other things, what are the characteristics of the current client experience in accounting firms or some of the things maybe that we might be looking to move away from?
Sarah Dobek (05:16):
Well, I'll give you a really copied example. I would generally say that this is a very common thing that we see in most firms, and there's some variations. Let's just take the tax return process. We're all pretty familiar with that. Good majority of the firms offer these services in the marketplace. So a common scenario is you get a new client, you finish if you see what a sales process, the scoping, but we have the conversation with the client. We often will ask for the returns to come in so that we can assess some level of pricing, more importantly probably. So we have it to input into our tax system, but really it's meant to give a sense of the complexity of the tax return. What are we really dealing with? So we asked for that information and then depending on what time of year it is, it could be nine months before we talk to that client again to do their tax.
(06:12)
We'll be like, yep, we're happy to take you on. We'll do your tax work next or send me over your returns. And then it goes into this dead space oftentimes, and they get set up, they go through whatever the onboarding process looks like in your firm. That's a whole other conversation. But we get 'em set up, we fill out our forms, they go to all the various software systems that they need to go to, and then typically they'll get an engagement letter before the tax work is being done, oftentimes delivered with the organizer so we can go months. If the person comes in during tax season, it's happening right away. And those touch points are immediate, but it just goes debt. Maybe the firm remembers they need a mid-year meeting or they need a year end meeting, I'm going to go ahead and reach out to them.
(07:00)
So maybe there's one touch point in that nine month timeframe, or maybe the client reaches out to them, but otherwise we hear nothing. And then we get into the tax return process and there's various touch points to request of information depending on what software you use. That looks like a lot of different things. And maybe we talk to the client when we deliver the return. And this is a very transactional relationship, and that's the opposite of what clients want. Many clients leave their firm because they can't get ahold of 'em, they can't get responses. Returns aren't being done in a timely fashion. And so even with a modest amount of intentional effort, we can do a way better job of how do we onboard the client? How do we communicate with them and nurture them? Maybe they get our newsletter, maybe there's a whole welcome series that we send to them.
(07:51)
We have to think about where we're touching the clients and what that experience is going to create with them. How are we bringing them into the firm and into the culture, and more importantly, building the relationships. Because nine months is a really long amount of time to wait to build a relationship with the client that you just brought in the door. And I hear so many times, well, we send out the organizers and we're not really sure who we're going to get back. We should never be questioning who is returning to the practice, but because we only maybe talk to them once or twice a year, we absolutely question. We don't know if we're doing that return next year. Again, kind of like this. I don't know
Dan Hood (08:27):
If those people are still alive. I have no idea. And I will say that when you send out the organizer, I don't know I, having received my fair share of organizers, I can tell you you're probably losing some clients there when they open their organizer and go, oh no. Oh no, I'm not, don't. Don't even know what half of these things are. I am going to go back to Bob who did it last year. Well, listen, we talked about, so that gives us a sense of what it looks like now or currently some of the issues the firms may be having. I want to dive into what a better client experience might look like, and you've given us some hints of what it might look like. But we're going to take a quick break first, and we're back. We're talking with Sarah Beck a bit about his consulting.
(09:09)
I've talking about client experience. We've gone through a little bit of why, what the baseline looks like and why. It give us some idea of what maybe we might need to improve. And I think it's probably worth, as you mentioned it, it's probably worth reiterating that this isn't a question of bad service or lack of interest in serving clients. As you say, people are like, well, we delivered on time. We do good work. We make sure we get it to them. We give them an organizer, and all that sort of stuff. Some of it comes down to just understanding what that looks like on the other side. As you said, if you get in touch with us and say, we'll see you in nine months, that's nine months where you haven't contacted them all. So maybe we can actually turn around and say, as I said, I think you've given us some hits of what this might look like. What does a better client experience or a more engaging client experience look like?
Sarah Dobek (09:50):
Yeah. Well, I think it starts by this commitment and being intentional around the touch points in your business and actually trying to think about them. The other is when you think about the touch points and you think about the things that you're doing, also doing it with a lens of what might work best for the clients. Oftentimes we develop a process and pick a system through the lens of what works best for us internally. And I'm not going to say it's one or the other, but I think that we always have to weigh those decisions, especially when it comes to a portal and at end, you alluded to it, you've got your fair share of work and man, this is a pain. Some of them are just awful. They're awful portals. As an end user, and look, I'm an astute person. I work with CPA firms all day long, but man, I'm like, I don't want to use that portal.
(10:42)
That's horrible. I feel like I'm doing your job for you. And they've come a long way. I've seen some great ones. By the way, they're some good products that are coming out on the marketplace that I would prefer to use over those, sometimes the ones that I have access to. But even something like that, oh, well, we use that one because it inputs directly to our software and it's super easy and seamless, but your clients are like, they're like, yeah, we can't get adoption. Well, I wonder why we can't get adoption because it's a horrible user interface. There's no way to scan anything from your phone. So when we think about creating a client experience, I think we have to start with the client in mind and put ourselves in their shoes. So one of the things that we really encourage firms to do is go through and look at the various processes.
(11:28)
Look at your client intake, look at your client onboarding. Look at how you start to engage clients in the delivery of the service and put them at the center of that and say, what do you think they're feeling? What is their experience? What is our process? Oftentimes, it's a process that is not followed by all or standardized. It's standardized in theory, but it's not typically followed by all great. We have this great client form, it's never filled out. We get the basic information and that's it. And then we spend all these hours trying to track down the information that we need to do our jobs and go back and forth. And so the client gets a hundred emails from us instead of five emails from us, or something that can be accomplished in a five minute phone call seems to take infinitely longer. And so when we start to have conversations about what is that and start looking through the lens of the client, we can start to imagine how can we tweak this?
(12:28)
Because very small changes can have a big impact for the client. At the end of the day, just being better organized in how you go to the client can make a huge difference. It makes the client feel like you are being proactive with them, that you've got your stuff together, that it's working smoothly and it feels to them like it's seamless. Even the onboarding, when they switch accounting firms, there's probably a lot of fears that they have. And if we go nine months without talking to 'em, we have no opportunity to waylay those fears and they might just think, oh, this is exactly my last firm might really changed, or I don't know about this. So I think when we started think of what it could look like, it's going to look like a lot more touch points with our clients, but it's also going to look like process procedures and technology that balance firm need with client need, and that we're actually thinking about what that looks like.
Dan Hood (13:23):
A lot of, as you say, a lot of it's just thinking about what would this look like if I were coming in? How would I feel about, how would I feel about going nine months without somebody contacting me? How would I feel with this is a common problem in accounting firms, particularly around tax, right? Chasing down the clients to get the tax information. And it's very annoying from the accounting firm's point of view to be like, oh, I got to constantly go back and forth. But from the client's point of view, it's just as annoying. They're probably thinking, oh, why are you bothering me for this again? Are you making, why didn't we do this all at once? Why didn't we do this nine months ago when I joined up? Why are you asking me for things that I don't know what they are or how to get them or who would provide 'em for me? So I mean, it's that simple shift in how would this look from the other person's point of view. It's got to be a big help.
Sarah Dobek (14:05):
Well, and some of it's communication too with the client. I generally find because we don't have enough time, the communication sits, the list of information that we need sits in people's inbox because they have 200 people that they have to contact or we get the information in, but we can't touch it and review it. And so then three months later, we're going back to the client to say, oh, we're finally picking up your return. We have time to do it now, and we're missing pieces of information. And so some of the things that a lot of firms are doing to help address not just the bandwidth issue, but it's actually impacting client experience, is putting people in charge of that that are not the CPAs. There's a little training that's going to be involved and there's some coordination. But to me, it's crazy to think I've got a 50 or 200 of these sitting in my unbox I can't follow up on.
(14:54)
I don't have enough time. It's a major bottleneck. But just changing that. I remember starting to get emails from my accounting firm and somebody in their office as they delivered the tax return. It used to be the partner. There's no reason the partner needs to put that email together and say, Hey, your return's ready. Here's how you download it. And I know that I can go to that person with any questions if I have trouble accessing the system. But it is absolutely a standardized email that she probably sends to everybody, and she probably spends a little time to customize it, swaps out my name and references to the states or whatever that we file in. But it's way better than before where I'd just get an email with no information in it really at all. It's like, here's your link. It was like the standard hand whatever came with the system. And so I did notice that change and it was much easier. The instructions were much clearer. I didn't have to log in to get something. So it's small things like that that I think can make a big difference in how we communicate with our clients and setting expectations so they're not wondering because in the absence of any information, we are always going to make it up ourselves.
Dan Hood (16:00):
And what we're going to make up is usually bad. Something's wrong, something's going on. They're not talking to you because I owe a million dollars. I'm going to prison. I'm
Sarah Dobek (16:07):
Not going to be able to pay by tax, and if I can't hold off the jail, our minds go of the worst places.
Dan Hood (16:13):
And it's interesting, you talk about that having someone other than the partner do it. It seems like one of the key things is introducing people to as many members is the team as possible. You talk about with some other professional services providers, one of the nice things is to be able to contact someone in the office and not feel like you're bothering the partner. If you say, listen, I just have a quick question about this number. It's not an advisory question, it's not a deep thing. It's just a when do I owe this to you? Or what form are you actually looking for? I don't want to talk to a partner about that. I want to talk to the person below the partner who's probably better informed about some of the details of this work. And it's a little easier to make that call because you don't feel like you're bothering the partner. Again, I keep coming back to that non C P A people. People aren't in firms. That seems like a big step, like contacting a partner as opposed to I'm reaching out to the administrative assistant who handles all the paperwork and they can help me with that. So having a sense of that team I think has got to help.
Sarah Dobek (17:04):
It absolutely is, and it's helpful for firms. Firms are kind of afraid to let go of that probably because there's a lot of self-identity built in being the one person that your clients go to, but it's not sustainable for most organizations. And it can take a little while to shift that. If you have a firm that culturally that's how it's always been, or your people haven't interacted with clients, one huge mistake. You can't scale your organization if you can't have people interacting, right? Clients know when to come to you. They know when the need is complex. They will make it clear. There are some clients that 100%, they're the ones that are like, I'm not going to talk to anybody else. But that's a very small percentage. And then you can price that right accordingly and call 'em or price it accordingly for that need.
(17:52)
But for the rest of them, I mean, they're smart individuals. And so once they get introduced to other people and build a relationship, there's value. Because what's most important to them is usually responsiveness. It's like I want to be able to get an answer right away. And I don't know about you, Dan, but I am too busy in my day to respond timely to every single thing. I can't sit on email and respond immediately. It's sometimes days before I get back to people because of the amount that's in my inbox and the demands on our time, and not because I don't value it and I have people that help me, but it's a necessary evil doing business. And so when we talk about such a high demand and high quantity of work that's being done in accounting firms, thinking about that and thinking about the client experience and the trade-off around some of that, I think is really important.
Dan Hood (18:42):
Absolutely. Absolutely. Alright. I think we've laid out a lot of excellent ways which firms can think about bettering their client experience. And all of these things need to be based on the premise that we understand that accountants are very, very, very, very, very busy and don't have a lot of bandwidth, and that's one of the reasons why the client experience isn't quite maybe what it should be on a basic level. But if you had all the time in the world and you could build a beautiful client experience, maybe we could talk a little bit about sort of aspirational stuff, not just making sure we're taking care of clients on a basic level, but if you had all the time in the world, what would a beautiful client experience look like?
Sarah Dobek (19:18):
Yeah. Well, the place that we start in, the easiest low hanging fruit to tackle is look at your client intake and onboarding process. Look at the beginning and the end of the process points, because there's a lot of touch points oftentimes where the work is being done. So think about, and I separate client intake from onboarding. Intake is about getting the information in to get the engagement letter out, get them into your system, the step that happens between, okay, client X, we're going to work with you. We're going to do your work now, move forward. Right? The onboarding is about how we get them integrated in our system and where we start the touch points with them. And this is where we have the opportunity to create what we call our onboarding campaigns that welcome them into the firm, that educate them about the firm, whether that's how to pay your bills or what to expect in your first tax season.
(20:12)
What are the common timelines? What are the things we're going to ask of you? What does season look like here? Why is it important when we give you a deadline that you pay attention to that? Because we have 2000 other clients that we're serving too. You are really important and we all have to have the same deadline. Unfortunately, that's not movable in the I R s. So those types of things I think are easy places for firms to start to think about what they want that experience to be. And it could be everything from a communication to, we've heard firms that give gifts as part of their touch points. It could be a phone call, it could be an onboarding where we talk about consulting and advisory, especially in the CAS space. They do onboarding calls because of the amount of information they're gathering and just the kind of dynamic nature of the conversation. Not always needed on the tax side, but if it's a really complex client, maybe it is. So I think starting to map that out, start with what your process is currently, because oftentimes we don't take the time to visualize that. It's kind of rolling around in our head, so let's look at the current process and then let's start questioning everything around it. And if you don't see a lot of touchpoints with the client, that's where I would challenge you to go, like, how and what should we be communicating to clients around that?
Dan Hood (21:31):
Gotcha. And never let 'em sit for a long time without some kind of touchpoint
Sarah Dobek (21:35):
Or put them in a nurturing sequence. Make sure they're in your email marketing, make sure they're getting your newsletters. Not all touchpoints have to be two way, but make sure that they're getting something from you, that they're hearing something from you. And at some point, human interaction is really good too, so don't go too long without that. But it's not like you need to call them every month. I'm not advocating that unless there's a purpose.
Dan Hood (22:00):
Well, there actually may be clients you want to call every month, but it should be at the very least as you're making sure you're communicating in some way or another, cast clients for instance. I mean, that's something you would build into a cast thing. What's one of the nice things about caste is that it's understood that you build that regular communication, which is odd when you think about it for caste. Oh yeah. That we do this for cast with a clear implication. We don't do that for anything at which may explain the problem you're discussing today. Excellent. Excellent. Alright, well, this has been great. I think hopefully we can some people when they next have free time, some ideas for what they can do, what they can do to build a client experience and why they should build one, because that may be even a more important question, but any final thoughts on that? Any final takeaways you want people to have as they go forward? Things they should really be bearing in mind about a client experience?
Sarah Dobek (22:49):
No, just give it a try. Something is better than nothing, so don't knock yourselves. We're not looking for perfection. Just keep in mind it's always about progress. So make a couple tweaks, let that settle and do a few more. It's hard to overhaul everything at one time,
Dan Hood (23:06):
And I suspect we can predict that They will be surprised at the reaction. I think they'll find that it'll very quickly, clients will be like, Ooh, this is great. Thank you.
Sarah Dobek (23:15):
Absolutely. Yes.
Dan Hood (23:17):
Excellent. All right, Sarah Dobek of inovautus Consulting. Thank you so much for joining us.
Sarah Dobek (23:20):
Thanks for having me, Dan,
Dan Hood (23:21):
And thank you all for listening. This episode of On the Air was produced by Accounting Today with audio production by Kevin Parise. Rate or review us on your favorite podcast platform and see the rest of our content on accountingtoday.com. Thanks again to our guest, and thank you for listening.