Some firms ‘get’ customer care and others don’t. Paul Shrimpling offers real life examples of both and explains how it can make or break your firm.
Your customer care processes will make or break your firm. If clients aren’t happy with the service you’re providing, they will go elsewhere, so it pays to ensure they are satisfied. I’m going to illustrate my point using some real life examples – I call it the ‘Four Funerals and a Wedding’ lesson.
Below are four tales of woe about real customer care breakdowns between accountants and their clients (the funerals) and one tale of success (the wedding). They were all related to me by one business owner.
Funeral one
“The first accountancy firm were chartered and recommended to me by my bank manager. They hung on to my records for months and ‘forgot’ to submit my accounts to HMRC. Had I not chased it up, I would have received a penalty. When my accounts eventually arrived, my utterly untrained eye spotted five errors or queries where I thought they were costing me tax rather than saving it (they were!). I gave them the boot and demanded a full refund, which I eventually got”.
Funeral two
“The next firm was fine but not chartered. I spent several years arguing over whether I should make my firm a limited company. When 11 other finance/legal professionals had yelled at me to do it and he was the only one still saying no, I figured it was time to move on. It turned out this accountant was unable to do limited company accounts. I would still recommend him to sole traders, but it did niggle me that he could get the accounts finished and back in the post to me on the day he received him. While he got full marks for speed, from a value perception he was on a better day rate than I was! He’d be better off hanging on to the accounts for a week, then getting them back and still his clients would think he was amazingly quick”.
Funeral three
“My third accountant was a chartered firm in Cambridgeshire. Nice chocolate cake but how many times do you have to say ‘I want a fixed rate and don’t want any nasty surprise bills’ before they get the message? They’d do work I hadn’t asked for, tell me to give the VAT man extra money and then charge me £450 for the privilege! I actually sent them a kind of ‘final warning’ letter, setting out the SLA I wanted them to work to, and said I wanted to be able to talk to them without worrying about the clock ticking and wanted to know exactly what their annual fee would be and no more. I also told them that if tried sending me any more surprise bills we would have to part company. They did it again, so I gave them the boot”.
Funeral four
“I was wowed by the next set of accountants, who came to pick my records up from me and delivered them back in person, and offered a fixed annual fee paid monthly. Unfortunately, the accountant they allocated me seemed to know less about accounting than I do (which isn’t a lot), they gave me factually incorrect advice on three occasions (that would have cost me money if I hadn’t smelled a rat in time and done the legwork myself), didn’t respond to queries within the timescales set in their SLAs (and had to be chased several times) and they wouldn’t change me over to a different accountant. So, off they went. They promised me the earth but couldn’t deliver the basics. Not only that, but they were a real pain when it came to responding to requests for information by my next accountant”.
The wedding
“After three years with my current accountant, I can’t think of anything at all that they could do better. They offer a shedload of optional extras to help build the business, including really good networking/training seminars, a jam-packed website, and I have a second contact in case my accountant isn’t around – so the world doesn’t stop just because he’s on holiday. They are genuinely proactive about helping businesses to develop and save tax, the service is second to none, they regularly ask for and listen to feedback; they deal with the tax/VAT man on everything for me (rather than just dump the accounts on me to deal with like all the previous ones did). They even gave all clients free accounting software until the cost got too expensive and they had to stop – and even then they were brilliant at helping me set up QuickBooks as a replacement.Granted, they’re not the cheapest but I don’t mind that, given the amount of hassle and stress they’ve taken away from me. I’m confident that they save me enough in tax to at least cover their fee anyway”.
So there you have it – five stories capturing the glaring customer care errors you must avoid, but also some essentials that you must adopt if you’re serious about client care.
Got any client care tips/warnings of your own? Share them below.
Paul Shrimpling is managing director of Remarkable Practice and author of a whitepaper entitled ‘The 7 big mistakes that accountants make that costs them a fortune in lost sales, lost profits and lost personal cash’.