Higher profits, more clients, more services. If these sound like your firm’s growth goals, never forget that achieving them will always come back to one important task: Keeping your clients happy.
In a survey conducted by Accounting Today on behalf of Wolters Kluwer, more than half (54%) of small firms reported they were working on improving their customer experience through digital platforms or client collaboration portals.
Those firms are on the right track. Whether you’re looking to increase retention, upsell existing clients, or get more referrals, you’ll need to focus first on establishing exceptional customer service and providing a satisfying end-to-end client experience. The right tech stack can help.
Customer Experience Tools Should Keep Existing Customers Happy
Happy clients aren’t just saving your staff headaches; they’re also saving you money. It costs your firm much more—in marketing dollars, staff time, and other expenses—to acquire a new client than it does to keep an existing one. Plus, if a less-than-satisfactory service experience drives away an existing client, new client referrals are bound to decrease too.
If your firm has identified improving client experience as a strategic goal, consider how you’re sending and receiving client information and how you’re communicating with clients.
Specifically, ask if your portal and client collaboration tools:
- Provide secure, on-demand document access to your clients, reducing the time your staff spends going back and forth with clients about where their documents are
- Support sending and receiving a wide variety of documents, ensuring your clients can upload any file you might need to complete their return—and that you can supply returns and reports to them in a variety of formats.
- Integrate with your existing document management system, saving you time publishing and retrieving client documents by streamlining and automating certain steps.
Client Collaboration Tools Provide Premier Service to Your Clients
Yes, Portals and client collaboration tools can help create a seamless end-to-end experience for your clients. But make sure your firm chooses one that aligns with your strategic goals. If that involves increasing the number of services used by existing clients, you need to up your customer service game.
Solutions that support better communication and transparency create satisfied clients who are more likely to work with your firm. You also should look for tech tools that integrate predictive intelligence and client analysis. These can help you leverage data to identify opportunities to upsell current clients on additional services.
Adding a tool like CCH Axcess™ Client Collaboration to your tech stack allows your firm to provide clients with much-needed tax guidance, be more proactive throughout the year, and save critical time with a simplified, frictionless end-to-end client experience.