Feedback gives you with insight into how your clients see your firm and will lead you in the right direction to bettering your practice. Read more here.
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Courtney is a Customer Experience Specialist at Canopy.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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!
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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Courtney is a Customer Experience Specialist at Canopy.
Canopy takes the headaches out of client management by offering a way to keep client info organized.
I love how easy it is to setup a new client in this software. Once set up, it's one click to get IRS transcripts downloaded for my review. This saves me at least an hour each week in comparison to the software I used to use.
This makes workflow for tax resolution manageable. This business is a bunch of hurry up and wait. This system helps to refresh my memory while transitioning to different clients.
The ability to securely share documents with clients as well as complete POAs from client contact data already in Canopy. The ability to route workflow between team members with color coded statuses allows us to work efficiently.
Cool features, outstanding customer service, constantly updating to make it better. I love that I can upload files easily to a secure client portal and we don't have to email files anymore. Absolutely can't imagine not having this software.
It's safe and secure. Clients are able to upload documents and the documents are saved their portal which as a result, keeps us better organized. The task feature keeps us organized and we know exactly the status of each client.
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