It shouldn’t come as a surprise that clients expect high-quality, tailored service and experiences that consider their unique and personal situation.
This is true from both a personal shopping and a business sense. With many businesses finding experience and connections matter more than ever, to keep and grow their client base. With 75% of clients willing to spend more / buy additional services from companies that provide quality experiences, it’s vital that your accounting practice is prioritising your client experience and journey as a key business strategy.
While you may think that providing highly tailored and personalised experiences is hard work, thanks to technology, automation and data, it really doesn’t have to be.
Here, we share three ways you can leverage technology and your existing data to provide personalised customer experiences that will ensure your clients feel understood, appreciated and valued.
1. Use their name
A very simple automation that your practice can implement quickly is to personalise your email marketing. You are likely already storing a first name or salutation for each of your clients, alongside their email address, in your practice management platform. While some cloud-based practice management platforms may include direct integrations with email marketing services (such as MailChimp or Active Campaign), this data can generally be extracted and uploaded in bulk to your email marketing platform. You can then use placeholders or simple coding to do things like automatically render the recipient’s name in the email body or subject line – making it much more personal. You can even extend this concept to set up automated email messages to wish clients a happy birthday or anniversary.
2. Customised marketing content
Unless your accounting practice is highly specialised or in a niche industry, it’s likely that not all of your clients are interested in the same content that you’re sharing in your email newsletters. For example, you might want to share odometer reading templates for those clients that have to pay Fringe Benefits Tax – but this content may not be relevant to your entire client base. Similarly, business management tips and tricks won’t be helpful for salary and wage clients.
Much like personalising the salutation in your email marketing campaigns, you can utilise attributes or data within your practice management platform to help identity which clients to send specific content, tools, templates and resources. Set up “tags” in your email marketing platform based on client interests, characteristics or service offerings, and design your campaigns to send updates to those you know are interested in the topics.
3. Paying attention to communication preferences
Not all clients are comfortable with email. Some may prefer to receive letters in the post while others may prefer a personal client portal. Tailoring how and when you communicate with your clients is a simple way to acknowledge their preferences and provide an appreciated experience.
While many automation document processing platforms limit the options you have for engaging with your clients, ATOmate allows you to tailor how you share ATO documents and communicate with your clients on an individual level.
Not only does ATOmate automatically access up to date correspondence from the ATO, cross check those against your practice management data and generate personally addressed correspondence, it also allows you to choose how you share communications with each of your clients.
The ATOmate platform provides options to email documents directly to clients, generate physical letters or push documents and communications directly to a growing number of client portals. ATOmate makes it incredibly easy to tailor your client communications and provide a flexible, highly personalised experience that is automated and consistent.
These are just three ways your accounting practice can and should be utilising data and technology to take the hard work out of creating quality, personalised client experiences that are highly automated. However, your personalisation efforts can’t be created without quality data and segmentation. Reviewing what data, you collect and store about your clients is something your business should review regularly. Spending the time to keep your client data up to date will serve you in the long run.
If you’d like to kick around how your practice can better leverage your existing data and how ATOmate can help you create personalised client communication experiences, click here to book a complimentary discovery call.
With over 25 years of experience in the technology industry, Stan’s professional focus has been on building high-performance teams and leading organisational change through operational efficiency.
Stan is passionate about assisting businesses to reach their full potential through the delivery of automated processes, supporting them to achieve smarter and innovative outcomes for stakeholders and greater productivity and job satisfaction across their teams.
Most recently, Stan has enjoyed working closely with professional services businesses to implement technological transformation projects and automate their key business processes.
BAW is an innovative company that provides automation solutions to businesses including accountants, property managers and the manufacturing industry.
The company’s automation solutions allow business managers, partners, IT managers and staff to refocus their attention away from tedious, time-consuming tasks towards value-added outcomes, such as managing and maintaining client relationships and engagement.
BAW’s flagship product, ATOmate, is designed to automate the processing, reviewing, and distribution of ATO correspondence. ATOmate integrates with a range of market-leading practice and document management platforms, helping accountants reduce their ATO document processing time by 90%.
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