Client Experience Tools, Technology & Processes

Whether you deal with tax or customer accounting services, your customer experience should be considered in all areas of your business. You need to get the best possible experience for your customers and your company’s employees while maximizing the bottom line for the partners. Effective document exchange, collection, management and distribution with customers is an important point of friction for many companies.

What’s the best tech stack for working with customers?

With technologies moving to a cloud / SaaS architecture, many companies need to review their current strategy, which is likely to be an on-premise LAN or hosted by a provider.

Architecture of your roadmap

Since many of the large suite providers do not offer a complete solution, the need for CAS tools forces companies to take a best-of-breed approach.

When choosing a tech stack, start by choosing a platform that suits your customers. Once you’ve chosen an ecosystem, this is the platform that you should focus on.

● Today’s choices for CAS technology stacks include:

o QuickBooks Online

o Xero

o gravity

o Accountability

o AccountingSuite

o Sage Intact

Next, decide about the services you will provide. Here are a few to note:

● Services required for compliance or operation:

○ Sales tax

○ Payroll

○ Invoice payments / accounts payable

● Services that are less painful for business owners:

○ expenses

○ Time entry

○ Document management

○ Document collection

● Reporting:

○ forecast

○ Financial reporting

○ KPIs

Finally, consider tools that automate your team to minimize:

○ Import data

○ Robotic process automation (RPA)

○ Pre-billing

○ Digital plumbing (like Zapier)

Finally, create a grid of your options. Reach out to others in your business circles for help. Read reviews. Select three products in a category for an in-depth review. Keep track of your options in a table (example below). Build your procedures. And finally, you offer your customers this service category.

Grid options

Maintaining client and team member experience with security

If you are taking just one idea away from this article, it should be that your customer experience is important! However, to get the right customer experience and the right experience from team members, we need to choose the right tech stack and have a strong vision. Client Experience 2.0 drives Firm Experience 2.0.

So how do we create an efficient and pleasant customer and team experience? What makes customer interactions with your company easy and minimizes the effort for your team? How do team members do things effectively all year round? The key is to close the “air gap” between your clients and your systems.

Create a Client Experience 2.0 “Air Gap” scorecard to see how your business is doing.

● First, write down where your company is today in terms of portal acceptance (e.g. 25%)

● Then write down where your customers stand in terms of smartphone acceptance (e.g. 90%)

● The delta is the gap

Every customer in this void represents inefficiency, poor customer experience, and risk:

● Inefficiency – The problem for the company is particularly acute as employees have to split the time between several processes (send to portal – if that fails they switch to email, SMS, etc.).

● Bad Customer Experience – Customers with smartphones expect great technology. If they are not using your current solutions, send a signal

● Risk – the secondary means of communication (e-mail, SMS, etc.) are vulnerable on both sides

Compare with Best of Breed

● Top performers have no gaps (e.g. all financial institutions, digital first companies)

● In a post-COVID world, companies need a clear digital strategy to meet customer expectations – and gap analysis provides a quantifiable measure to understand how well the company is doing

What can companies do to close this air gap?

Outside of your peak season is a great time to focus on the relationship between “making things easy” and “getting things done”.

● To create a great customer experience, you need to realize that customers want Easy. Customers should be able to respond to inquiries quickly, completely, and easily without being frustrated. Low portal acceptance rates, frequent customer searches for documents, and requests to resend documents indicate that you are benefiting from upgrading your digital front office.

● Great customer experience goes hand in hand with business efficiency. When your team gets the information they need from customers in a timely manner, they can do their best.

● The team members’ experience should also be smooth. Your team should have all the information and records necessary to carry out a project and work with clients and company employees. There should be no restrictions on where or when team members work.

There are also security aspects to Client Experience 2.0. How do we protect digital documents in this new, interactive and collaborative world?

Users use web browsers, mobile devices, and often lack extensive IT skills or support. The tools we select must be secure, have native multi-factor authentication (MFA) and offer single sign-on (SSO), OAuth or passwordless functions. Additionally, customers and team members expect us to be connected and that all data is safe and encrypted, even if they don’t know what that means!

Therefore, when exchanging sensitive customer information, we need to select the right risk management tools. To do this, choose and use fewer tools, check the security of all tools used, enforce MFA, have control procedures for critical tasks and deadlines, and encrypt in transit and at rest. In addition, we can control the practice with a suitable practice management / workflow. Turn on MFA everywhere. And of course you never communicate unsecurely via email or SMS.

Risk Management – Consider the following tools:

● Secure document collection / communication tools like Liscio

● Reporting tools such as Fathom, Spotlight or Jirav

● Security tools such as MFA and single sign-on

● Workflow tools such as carbon

● Cash flow tools like LivePlan

● Encrypted storage tools like SmartVault

In summary, you focus on finding secure tools that minimize customer friction so that your team can efficiently receive and process the customer’s sensitive information. All boats go up when you make it easy for your customers to safely do business with your business.

In Part 2 of this article, we examine how CAS Advisory can drive forward and how you can leverage a Client Experience 2.0 model to knock your customers and employees out of the woods.

At Liscio, we are committed to the craft of customer experience. We believe that the right customer experience speeds data exchange between business and customer, minimizes wasted movements and generates enthusiastic fans. Liscio’s platform achieves these goals by having all the tools the customer needs to react quickly right at hand – including an all-in-one mobile app, automatic reminders and even a mobile document scanner. Since all customer communications and documents are centralized in Liscio, employees can quickly see what is going on with each customer account. And because Liscio is so easy to use for customers, they send documents quickly when asked. No more data silos, no more tracking customers for documents, and no more searching across multiple platforms. To see how Liscio can help you deliver a premium experience to your customers and employees, book a personalized demo.
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