How Personal Accountants Can Provide Personalized Client Experiences

By Joe Greenspan.

The financial services industry is a people-driven sector with professionals, like personal accountants, relying on healthy client relationships to fuel their bottom line. With the average accounting firm handling anywhere from 50 to over 200 clients, the deck is stacked against accountants looking to provide clients with a personalized experience. However, exceptional customer experiences are critical to a financial professional’s, or business’s, retention, with 77% of customers stating they are more willing to stay with a financial firm if they feel valued.

This is why customer relationship management (CRM) solutions have quickly become the most valuable software among accountants and firms to help improve sales, efficiency, and, of course, customer satisfaction. While personal accountants and financial institutions alike continue to scrape the surface of CRM technology, those who master the capabilities of their CRM software can set themselves apart from the crowd and develop personalized customer experiences that leave them comfortably ahead of the curve.

Mastering Client Management

At its basic level, a CRM platform allows accountants to track and organize client information including notes, documents, upcoming activities, secondary contact information and relationship status just to name a few. But going a level deeper, CRM platforms can be customized to even include individual client accounts or assets under management (AUMS) pages. From here, users can track all of a client’s current house accounts including 401k’s, savings accounts, pensions, IRAs and business accounts. Additionally, accountants can manage a client’s policy, investment, retirement and estate planning all from within their portfolio. This level of integration enables accountants to assess investment and planning performances effortlessly to quickly flag and communicate potential risks or profitable gains.

Leveraging Search Functionalities

Accountants have vast amounts of client data and details that they need access to at any given time. A highly functional, customizable, internal search engine is pivotal for accountants who are juggling so much at once. When it comes to things like policy or estate plans, accountants may not always be dealing with the account owner, which only adds to the complication. When a spouse or relative on the plan calls with an inquiry, quickly searching their names in the CRM database and pulling relative information saves advisors’ time and avoids creating a negative customer experience in the process.

In addition, the financial industry is highly regulated. Accountants can be asked to provide relevant documents or information at any time. A robust CRM, with customizable search parameters, enables accountants to separate and categorize important information or documents and create search rules to simplify retrieval of such files—saving them hours by not having to rummage through paperwork.

Integrating Email Communications

Like a highly functional search engine, email integration for CRM platforms is essential for accountants from a compliance standpoint. By connecting an email to their CRM platform, users can capture interactions and histories automatically, eliminating vast amounts of tedious, previously manual, work. Even if emails are deleted or removed from the inbox, the histories are oftentimes still stored within a contact’s record, helping to avoid any human error or accidentally lost records. Aside from creating a paper trail, this saves advisors time. No longer are accountants forced to bcc themselves to record relevant email information into a contact’s records, the CRM platform simply does that work for them.

Because no two accounting firms are the same, it’s critical to find the right platform that meets your business’s unique needs. For accountants looking to personalize client communications, a platform that integrates email, makes managing clients seamless, and eliminates the need to constantly sift through paperwork is a must, and an important place to begin. Client satisfaction is centered around communication, and a CRM is the solution for accountants to communicate with an extensive client catalog efficiently and effectively.

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Joe Greenspan is VP of Commercial Operations at Act!