Most accountants are great at what they do. An article from WallStreetMojo states that CPAs “are adept at handling complex financial dealings through prompt human interaction.” They are literally the tax professionals. Though, there are always areas to improve in your field! We know what the customer experience entails, but now we need to talk about putting communication into action.  

Seeking feedback from clients and acting on it is a sure-fire way to ensure a wonderful client experience. A BrightLocal survey regarding customer reviews found that of the 74% of customers asked to provide feedback, 68% were actually willing to do it. That feedback will provide you with insight into how your clients see you and your firm and will lead you in the right direction to being a better professional who is on top of the customer’s experience.

How do you make a client survey? 

Create 

Prior to typing up your questions, you will need to brainstorm which information you are wanting to receive from your clients. Do you want to ask your clients how likely they are to recommend you to a friend? Maybe you want to know one thing they would change in order to make their experience easier/more efficient? Or, just give them a text box where they can have free rein and go wild? Now that you’ve got your questions thought up, I would recommend using the Google forms program to create your surveys.  

Disperse 

There are many ways you can send out surveys, but for our purposes, we’ll show you how to do it in Canopy. You can send out surveys via the bulk email feature within Canopy and you can even create a template for bulk emails as well.

Embed a form on your clients’ portals via the custom branding settings in Canopy. That way, you can give access to the form to any of your clients. Be sure to let the clients know that this is an added feature to their portals, so they have the opportunity to provide constructive criticism. It’s as simple as that!

Receive & review 

Note recurring comments and jot down those commonalities. This will help you physically see what is important to work on first. Once you’ve got your list, you will need to pare it down to one to two items that you can improve upon now.  

Act

Once you’ve got a good handle on what you will be improving upon first, take those client comments to heart and make the necessary changes! It may seem like a lot of work now, but I’m sure you won’t be feeling too bad about it when your clients are ranting and raving about their experience with your firm.

Don’t forget to have the entire team get involved with the enhancements. With the help of other coworkers teaming together for one cause, I can guarantee that, when improving upon constructive criticism, your firm will create amazing and much-needed open communication between practitioner and client.

Make sure to send out responses thanking the customer for their time and let them know of the improvements you are working on because of them. They will see how much your firm cares about their feedback and will greatly appreciate the communication in the meantime!

Call to action

In order for your firm to be known for your incomparable communication with clients, you will need to take advantage of client reviews when creating, dispersing, receiving & reviewing, and acting on the feedback you receive.

You must make communication a two-way street when it comes to understanding exactly what your clients’ experiences have been. Whether it be good or bad, you need to find out so that you can improve communication, and therefore improve your clients’ experiences!

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