bunny slippers – Page 8 – Cooper Mann Consulting

February 4, 2014

A Higher Level of Customer Relationship Management: Building Closer Customer Relationships

Most businesses recognize the importance of creating a quality experience for customers doing business with them. The thing that many business owners overlook is how their internal workflows and information management systems serve to either support or impede the delivery of a well-rounded positive customer experience. Growing businesses must adjust their processes and improve their tools in order to have the necessary information available to workers at various levels of the organization, providing a centralized means for collaboration, data sharing and analysis. With the right information systems and process support, even small businesses are able to function at exceptionally high levels and provide the consistently high-quality service and customer experience that establishes long-term value in each and every customer relationship.

Businesses which excel at providing very high levels of customer service tend to have a few common characteristics – features of the business that identify it as an organization geared towards growth and success in driving the customer engagement and business value. Among these characteristics is the recognition of the need to use technology better – leveraging automation to a greater degree to create consistency in work performance, and improving information collection and integration to provide more context and depth to the data. Added efficiency which affords employees time to focus on customer oriented tasks and elevating the customer experience even more is the payback.

Many CRM solutions describe the benefits of a “360 degree” view of the customer, yet these solutions often orient themselves to supporting only sales and Contact Management and do not address product and/ or service delivery (fulfillment of what was sold/ordered) or project management, contracts and agreements tracking or other aspects of doing business with the customer.

Granted, customer interaction occurs most frequently with sales and service teams, but there are potentially vast number of processes and tasks performed within the business which operate with the same information as sales and services, and which would benefit by integration within the same information and workflow framework.

By selecting a solution that addresses the wider variety of business and information management requirements rather than focusing solely on sales and support, business owners and managers find that they are better able to address internal workflows with streamlined process automation.

The result is significant improvement in the quality and completeness of the information available to users throughout the organization, ultimately improving the quality and nature of customer engagement and interaction. Perhaps even more impactful is the ability for the business to better understand the context of and motivations for customer interactions, and (most importantly!) having the capability to take immediate action based on that knowledge.

With the right customer relationship and business management solution in place, and with a focus on systematic approaches to enabling process and workflow automation, businesses can become more flexible and responsive to changing customer needs and expectations. Creating the complete view of the customer relationship and capturing the data which helps users understand the dynamics of the entire relationship serves to build closer customer relationships that will strengthen and grow over time.

When a business needs to implement a Customer Relationship Management solution to address sales and support needs, it makes sense to also review information management requirements for:

Delivery of products and/or services – i.e. fulfillment of what was promised by sales
Scheduling of Work/Service Orders and integrated billing based on completed work
Time and personnel activity management as well as time reporting and billing
Project or job resource and time management and reporting
Documents, contracts, before & after pictures, and agreements of all types
Products and services, proposals and quotes, price books and channels

Additionally, since the processes are so closely related in terms of the information collected or used, it makes sense that the CRM solution would also work with:

Marketing campaigns and activities, lead generation systems and e-newsletter solutions
Accounting solutions which also utilize customer, product, job, time, cost and other data
Expense spending management, approvals and reporting

To be truly useful, the solution must also support remote and mobile workers since field service personnel and other workers are often not in the office when they need to get something done. Whether the access is via hosted solutions providing full remote desktop functionality, or via web-based application extensions allowing device independent access (or both!), the solution should be designed to allow users to access the system and perform their work from wherever it is required.

Even more, a comprehensive approach to managing business activities and information, particularly with a focus on providing all departments with all the information and capability they need to get their jobs done properly, requires that everyone in the company be on board. There really isn’t a great way to centralize and manage critical business data when the approach is to give a few people some information and functionality, leaving it up to human beings and individual initiative to connect the dots (and the data). The result is almost always a series of gaping holes in various processes where information and requests get lost.

Among the best solutions I have found which delivers the foundation for all of this functionality is Results CRM. Thousands of users have successfully migrated from ACT!, Goldmine, Telemagic, Salesforce.com and other SFA and CRM solutions to the Results CRM platform, and have benefitted from better workflow automation, more logical company and contacts associations, and a broader range of functionality supporting everything from sophisticated quote and proposal development to comprehensive project, time and expense management.

At the end of the day, it’s the reporting that wins. If the data isn’t in the database, you can’t report on it. If you can’t report on it, you can’t measure it. If you can’t measure it, you can’t make good business decisions and grow the business.

Make sense?

December 24, 2013

Happy Holidays from CooperMann

Ninjabread cookies in the kitchen, an appearance by the Christmas Elk, and Minty Fresh (fresh cat, not canned) looking for Frangos all clearly indicate that the holiday season is here. 2013 has been an eventful year – some would say it was “fraught with peril” while others see opportunity in change. It’s all a matter of perspective – pursuing goals and taking action rather than resting on ones’ laurels and trying to wait it out. This cloud stuff isn’t going away.

With technology and social computing adoption increasing at almost alarming rates, I can’t wait to see how 2014 goes! This certainly isn’t a time for the tech-timid, as it appears as though the nerds and geeks do rule the world (aren’t we all a little nerdly, really?).

I hope you and yours have a wonderful season.

Cheers

Read the Best of CooperMann.com from 2013

December 20, 2013

Accounting, Technology and Small Business – The Best of 2013 from CooperMann

It has been an eventful year, hasn’t it? With the NSA lurking about collecting data, innovative new approaches to information and identity theft emerging almost daily, and complete turmoil in the IT services industry challenging trusted sales and distribution models, most of us have simply become numb to the noise. Information technology is evolving at an increasingly rapid pace and the way people and businesses interact with and use technology is being forced to change along with it. It’s starting to become almost, weirdly, natural.

Much of this change can be attributed to “The Cloud”, which is not a thing or a place. Cloud has become the term which applies to just about anything having anything to do with the Internet. For technology “purists”, cloud means something fairly specific, but for normal people (no offense to the nerds and geeks, but you know what I mean), cloud applies to pretty much anything accessible via the Internet. Photos back up to “the cloud”; music gets stored in “the cloud”, websites are hosted in “the cloud”; businesses run their applications in “the cloud”, and you can do darned near anything you need (or want) to with a phone. The cloud could be some guy’s server in his basement, or it could be a sophisticated network of systems housed in secure facilities around the globe. They both qualify, sort of. The point is that mobility, Internet services, subscription access to technology, and social computing are changing how people view technology – resulting with changes not simply in how IT is purchased, but in how IT is used and applied to daily life.

There are, however, some things that do not change even if the working environment does. The accounting profession, for example, is undergoing a great deal of change, and much of it fueled by the advancements in technology and social computing. But accounting fundamentals – the “truth of debits and credits” and the good old accounting equation – remain. The basics of running a business are also unchanged, even as methods of doing business evolve and globalization of markets continues. Business fundamentals – fiscal responsibility, cash and growth management, and focus on value and sustainability – are as necessary now as every before.

With all this change and IT “advancement”, there have certainly been impacts to how and where we work. But the more things change, the more they remain the same. Good business generates goodwill and more business – that doesn’t change – and bad news still tends to spread faster than good news (much faster, given social platforms that are designed to spread the word far and wide). And when it comes down to the fundamentals – the basic and essential foundations supporting building, operating, and accounting for business – we generally find that they remain constant even as the environment in which they exist experiences change.

Make Sense?

Here are the top 20 ranked posts for 2013 from CooperMann.com

Posts by category – with Accounting Professionals, QuickBooks Hosting, QuickBooks Software, and Small Business being the top categories with ranking articles.

ACCOUNTING PROFESSIONALS

Small Business Owner to Accountant: Make Accounting Valuable to ME

Accounting Professionals, You’re right – your clients don’t care about the numbers.

The Language of Accounting: Disconnect between Accountants and Bookkeepers

Why Accountants and Bookkeepers Use the Cloud

Bookkeeping and Benchmarks – Getting the Numbers Right

In Bookkeeping, Accounting, and Information Technology: The Value of Outsourcing

Re-defining the role of the accountant, or going back to the good old days?

The Collaborative Online Model for Small Business Accounting Professionals

Remote access to client bookkeeping comes in many forms because clients come in many forms

QUICKBOOKS AND BUSINESS APPLICATION HOSTING

What Small Businesses Need To Know about QuickBooks and the Cloud

Intuit Introduces Changes to Authorized Commercial Host for QuickBooks Program, Introduces QuickBooks Enterprise Rental Licensing

Hosting All My Applications in the Cloud

Intuit Hosting Program for QuickBooks Website Goes Live

Cloud Computing for Small Business: It’s All About 3 Apps

QuickBooks Hosting: New Program Tier Announced for QuickBooks Hosting Providers

Managed Applications, Cloudpaging, and a New Flavor of Hosted QuickBooks

QUICKBOOKS SOFTWARE

Changing How We See Software: QuickBooks 2013 interface frustrates power users

SMALL BUSINESS

4 Rules of Thumb for Business Success

4 Rules for Building Service Customer Loyalty

November 18, 2013November 18, 2013

4 Rules for Building Service Customer Loyalty

Every business owner knows that it’s important to retain the business of good customers, because those good customers will turn into referrals and more customers. What many business owner’s don’t know is that building customer loyalty – the repeat and referral business that keeps the doors open – takes more than producing a good product or having nice personnel. Building customer loyalty is a continuous process which involves just about every area of the business. Particularly with service-based businesses where there may be a number of variables involved with the delivery, proper information collection, management, and communication becomes the essential foundation for delivering on the promise of great service, which helps to develop loyal customers.

In a previous article titled “4 Rules of Thumb for Business Success”, I stressed the importance of creating the best business impression possible. Here are a few additional tidbits for service businesses – things the company can do to make sure that the work is done completely and correctly the first time, which is what leads to happy and loyal customers.

Rule 1. Remember that everyone in the company is essentially in a sales and service position. The customer should be able to get useful help or direction from any employee. Not that everyone in the company can do all the jobs in the business, but everyone should be willing and able to find the resources necessary to get the customer’s question answered. And it’s a good habit to try to set any necessary service appointments on the first call – it lets the customer know you’re ready to get the job done and saves them time. Too many sales teams simply answer inquiries from callers and don’t ask for the business. If you don’t ask, they can’t say yes.

Rule 2. Structure the order process to make sure that all information is captured, stored, and made available to service techs. Customer requests should be specifically noted, along with any special details or requests. There’s nothing more annoying than telling the company to watch out for something when they’re at your place, and then finding out that the tech didn’t get the memo. Also make sure that any specific work items or parts are listed on the order, making it easier for the tech to record what they do and use. All of this information should be available not just to techs, but to customer service and sales people, too. After all, mismanagement of order information is usually not the customer’s fault, yet the customer is the one who ends up not getting what they asked for. Avoiding this situation is critical to developing loyal, repeat customers. It also makes getting the customer sign-off more likely, and this signature should be captured at the work site when the job is completed (allows the billing department to get the invoice out much faster, which allows the company to get paid faster).

Rule 3. During the job, make sure customers and co-workers are informed as to the status of the work. The worst thing is to partially complete a job and leave the customer hanging – a situation that status tracking of service orders helps prevent. When the work is completed, make sure to let the customer know, and also provide observations and recommendations. Whether it’s a single job or a regular maintenance contract, always document what was done so that the customer knows exactly what work was performed. Use a checklist or cheat sheet to make sure things are done completely and consistently every time, including cleaning up and making notes about the job. Documenting things that technicians notice while at the customer location may provide the opportunity to offer more or other services to the customer, or might at least inform the customer about an issue they should be aware of. By paying attention while on-site and looking for upgrades or value-adds that might benefit the customer, service technicians can often position themselves as top sales people, too.

Finally, Rule 4, always thank the customer for their business and let them know you genuinely appreciate it. Smile, hand them a business card, and maybe even ask for a referral. If you’ve done your job well and kept the customer informed along the way, it’s likely that this customer will bring you more business both directly and through referrals and recommendations. That’s customer loyalty, and you can’t buy it anywhere – you have to build it.

Make sense?

November 11, 2013

Lawyer Immunity from Delivering Customer Value is No More

All indications are that business and revenue growth for law firms is no longer a function of head count. As with other professional service providers, lawyers are experiencing increased competition from a variety of new sources, and client demands and needs are changing as society adopts and embraces technology, social computing, and self-service solutions. The problem is that many partners and firm leaders don’t really know what do to about it, and are attempting to fuel continued growth of revenues and profitability while essentially maintaining status quo.

Looking to reduce costs and pushing for more billable hours is standard fare among firm managers, yet the results to be gained from these efforts have pretty much reached their maximum potential. You can only cut so much, and you can only work your people so hard. Unfortunately, many partners and managers simply look away from the problem and continue along the path that has been successful in the past. But growth has slowed, revenues have not grown as expected, and firms are literally being forced to adjust to market forces or go out of business. It’s just too competitive and the pace of change is too rapid. There is no immunity for lawyers in this changing market – service quality and value must improve.

Instead of taking the legacy approach of hiring more people so they can bill for more hours, successful firms are taking a few queues from other professional service providers and are recognizing that individualized client service, consistently high-quality and timely service, and service priced commensurate with the value delivered are at least parts of the solution.

There is quite a lot that law firms and accounting firms have in common, particularly when it comes to the fact that most of these entities are viewed – perhaps rightly so – as being “old school”, with a managing partner or board with intractable views and grey hair. Lawyers, like accountants, are inherently wary of new-fangled concepts and wild ideas. They’re a cautious bunch, and tend to be resistant to change. Yet accounting professionals are beginning to embrace new tools and new ideas when it comes to delivering service and value, and forward-thinking law firms are following suit.

For successful firms, the focus is on the client and the value delivered – on internal process improvements and a better value proposition for the customer – not on the billable hour. Yes, there are investments required. The firm must invest time most of all. It takes time to get everyone educated about issues the firm is facing in the changing marketplace. Unless everyone knows what they’re up against, there will be continued resistance to new ideas and concepts. It also takes time with clients to understand their needs, which is the essential element to delivering service valuable to them. And it takes time to develop and nurture a long-term vision, recognizing that the vision may change as conditions change, and that regular monitoring and adjustment may be necessary.

Investing time and consideration in these areas is the key to delivering customer (and shareholder) value. The result is satisfied and loyal clients, repeat business and increased growth and profitability. Rather than viewing this brave new world as a challenge to the firm’s traditional model, it should be viewed as the opportunity to deliver new and greater value to the firm’s customers.

Make Sense?

Read more about providing Client Solutions, not just Professional Service
Read more about Taking a Holistic Approach to Cloud-Enabling Your Law Firm
Read more about using the cloud to extend “connectedness” beyond traditional boundaries

October 17, 2013

Accounting Professional Value is Insight and Advice, Not Just a Hosted Server

Back in the late 90’s, when the application service provider model was first established, a number of providers recognized how beneficial it would be for public accountants to use hosted applications to work more closely with their accounting and bookkeeping clients. Seeking markets which would rapidly adopt a hosted application model, these providers focused on hosting small business accounting solutions such as Intuit QuickBooks desktop products, and then sought participation by the largest addressable communities of users working with those products – QuickBooks ProAdvisors, bookkeepers and accountants. The idea was that the community of QuickBooks professionals would benefit by bringing their clients onto the hosting platform, and service providers could sell to one professional and gain a bunch of small business users. It made sense, too, as it allowed the professional to have a single service and login that allowed them to access all their client QuickBooks company files. The client could log in to the system, too, delivering remote access and managed service benefits to the client, as well. But there was a catch, and it didn’t fully reveal itself until recently as cloud-based applications and true SaaS applications began to gain market adoption.

The problem actually started to reveal itself as more businesses elected to adopt hosting services. There’s a saying amongst the QuickBooks hosting providers that “nobody uses just QuickBooks”. Saying “nobody” uses just QuickBooks is a bit of a stretch, but the reality is that numerous businesses use other applications and software solutions in addition to their QuickBooks product. Sometimes these products integrate with QuickBooks and sometimes they don’t, but it is not often that a business utilizes just the one software solution. At minimum, there are likely email or productivity tools in use, too. The point is that the QuickBooks hosting providers – those hosts focusing on providing service to QuickBooks accountants and small business clients – realized that the number and variety of applications desired by their customers would grow very quickly, as would the variety of needed implementation models. The unfortunate solution of the time was to just put it all on the same environment.

The original selling message to the QuickBooks consultant and accountant markets was that they should get all their clients on to the hosting service, and then the accountant could benefit from an “economy of scale”, making the cost of the overall delivery lower. Further, by grouping the firm and the clients into a single hosting environment, it would make application and data sharing easier. Both of these messages are true, but putting the firm and its clients into a single environment – with the firm as the “sponsor” and front line promoter of the service – began to have impacts which were not clearly foreseen.

Accounting professionals and consultants changed the nature of their relationship with the client, going from trusted advisors to technology and solution vendors.
Client business technology needs were placed as secondary to “enabling” the working relationship between the accountant and the small business client.
Attempts to fully satisfy client technology requirements overburdened and impacted the environment, reducing overall service quality and satisfaction and diminishing the value of the scale economy (as well as the clients’ perception of their accounting professional).
Firms structured their processes to support a single technology and operating model, and found difficulties in adopting new strategies or solutions.

In concept, having accounting professionals and their clients all working seamlessly together in the same systems sounds great. For some firms, a cloud server packed with all the firm and client applications and data enables an entirely new business and service model, which is very cool and it actually works (for some firms and their clients). But the problem – a problem which may not be fully revealed in the short term – is that the various businesses involved, from the accounting practice to each and every client, has different business needs and operates as a unique organization. While there may be fundamental similarities, “the devil is in the details” as they say, and a single platform or hosting solution is unlikely to really work well for all. Even more potentially damaging, the perception of the trusted advisor who is now viewed as a vendor of IT services or software erodes the value of the client engagement and the potential for the firm to deliver greater benefit through their core offerings. A business owner is more likely to change vendors of IT service than they are their trusted accounting or finance professional. And they’re also more likely to change IT service providers if the provider cannot deliver exactly the application or service desired. When the accounting professional is perceived to be the IT service provider, the lines are blurred and the client ends up attaching their loyalty to a software product or business solution instead of the accountant advisor OR the IT provider.

With SaaS and native web-based applications being broadly adopted by small businesses, the opportunity for firms to engage with clients in different ways and with different solutions started to break the one-size-fits-all hosting approach. Professionals found that empowering their clients by supporting properly fitted solutions which work for the client business delivered the opportunity to become more operationally and strategically involved with the client business. Deeper operational and strategic involvement with the client became the means to drive increased value in the engagement and services offered and delivered. The client business was able to benefit from the involvement of their trusted advisor, regardless of what platforms or systems might be in place.

Accountants and bookkeepers are recognizing that the previous model of aligning the practice with a particular software product or delivery system may not be the best approach to building and retaining the customer base. With new business accounting and bookkeeping solutions emerging regularly – and gaining broad market adoption – and as more and more varied cloud based services and solutions are applied to various business problems – professionals will further recognize that their value is not tied to a cloud server, a single small business accounting solution, or to any particular technology. The value of the accounting professional is not in the software they support or the server it runs on. The value of the accounting professional is in the insight gathered and advice provided – services offered which help support better business management, growth and profitability.

Make Sense?

A Higher Level of Customer Relationship Management: Building Closer Customer Relationships

Share this:

Read the Best of CooperMann.com from 2013

Share this:

Accounting, Technology and Small Business – The Best of 2013 from CooperMann

Share this:

4 Rules for Building Service Customer Loyalty

Share this:

Lawyer Immunity from Delivering Customer Value is No More

Make Sense?

Share this:

Accounting Professional Value is Insight and Advice, Not Just a Hosted Server

Share this: