C.O.N.T.A.B.I.L. method to organize (and optimize) the service of your accounting office

Before we begin the text of C.O.N.T.A.B.I.L. method to organize (and optimize) the service of your accounting office, I need to warn you that this text is part of a trilogy to fully master marketing, sales, and service for the accounting office.

[1/3] Digital marketing strategies for accounting firms

[2/3] FBI sales techniques applied to accounting firms: how to close more contracts through WhatsApp

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If you followed our marketing step by step and the right way to sell with the former FBI agent, your client portfolio grew and the service flow from your accounting office kept up with that growth.

(If you missed our latest posts, tap the link at the beginning of this article to be redirected and read the series in full)

A likely consequence of this amount of customers is the chaos of WhatsApp from all sectors.

Unanswered customers... missed conversations... late deadlines... stressed employees...

Calm down!

That's good!

That means your office is growing and that's JUST a growing pain.

In this text, you will learn the C.O.N.T.A.B.I.L. method to structure and optimize the accounting assistance from your office.

If you have an accounting office and you want to retain your clients, you need to invest in a good customer service Because it's the best and Cheaper way to retain customers.

This sounds complex, but it's actually simple.

The answer is to organize, plan, and delegate to the right extent.

First, we need to talk about who you are, what you do, and who you serve. These are the most important points for everything to work.

You need to assess the aspects of each sector, the needs, number of employees, and the channels used for contact.

For example:

#1 Who are your customers?

#2 Do you serve only other companies or do you also serve individuals?

#3 Is there a seasonality of service?

But how does this impact your service operation?

This directly influences the number of people you are going to serve: whether you need to have a larger team for a certain period or if it is enough to divide this work, which has a peak of concentration over several months.

For example:

If the demand of your current customers is added to new clients during the income tax season and the volume becomes unbearable for your employees, have you considered dividing this demand over the other months of the year?

The income tax period won't change, but if the inflows and exits come over the months and you just need to push a button to submit, wouldn't everything be easier?

It is possible to track monthly income and expenses or invest in an app where your client can do this linked to your system and make the income tax part easy to submit, so you can pay more attention to those who have more urgency, such as customers who are new and need to report everything.

But you don't have to think about everything alone, I'm going to introduce you to a method to make everything easier, the C.O.N.T.A.B.I.L. method.

This is an 8-step method designed exclusively for accountants to organize themselves in the form of management and make all processes more efficient and their customers happier and, in the end, optimize your service to retain your customer and increase referrals.

So let's get to the points:

COURAGE

Courage to dare, admit the mistake and start over. This point is primarily meant to talk about leadership.

The managers of your accounting office, in the role of leader, must have courage, creativity, good communication, and especially Fit cultural with the company. Therefore, they need:

• Demonstrate and encourage healthy commitment, empathy, and self-compassion;
• Be transparent and gentle;
• Supporting rest and recovery;
• Recognize, name, and normalize collective fears in order to face them.

Don't confuse the leader with a superhero, the leader is just another human being, but one who must have social skills.

Even with his flaws, he needs to take the team to a better environment.

The leader doesn't have to be the one who will have everyone's smile, but he needs to be fair and transparent.

And, above all, you need to know how to put yourself in the place of the other, not as a pity, but in listening to the other and understanding through empathy.

If you remembered about the text of Consultative selling like an FBI agent, you are more than right, because that text not only teaches how to sell, but also teaches how to relate and make feelings and emotions palpable.

With all that said about courageous leadership, let's get to the next point:

ORGANIZATION

Have you thought about how you are going to organize your team?

Will everyone attend or will there be only one employee per department for service?

There is also the possibility of having a service team (outsourced) to provide the service and pass on the demands to the accountants.

Which solution will you choose for your accounting office customer service?

Let's analyze the three scenarios:
#1 All employees serve the public

That can decrease the productivity of your team of specialized accountants, because they need Divide attention between carrying out the work and receiving the demand from the client. After all, when the client does not have a high level of awareness about their problem, as happens when serving individuals, this may take longer than planned.

For example:
A customer arrives and says: “I have a problem with the Internal Revenue Service”. “Problem” is very vague, but it's what the layman knows how to say.

Your employee will need to investigate further and if, even so, the client is unable to answer what the problem is, a survey of the IRS will be necessary from the CPF or CNPJ to understand what the REAL problem is. But that requires time, time that could be better spent.

Another option is...

#2 Outsource the accounting service part through WhatsApp

Have you ever thought about setting up a WhatsApp call center to serve your customers? That at first seems great.

But can you imagine losing control of service quality and making your customers less satisfied?

This will not only reduce your customer base, but it will also inhibit your best form of attraction: word of mouth.

The best-case scenario is...

#3 Allocate some employees (specialized in each sector) to the service

That way, your team will be torn among those who are going to receive the demand (but are also specialized and, therefore, will ask the right questions and research to move on to exact demand for the sector partner) and who will execute the task in a more agile and efficient manner.

This improves the speed of the operation and gives your office a real dimension of professionalism.

Another important point, which is the third step of our ACCOUNTING method, is to worry only about...

NECESSARY

Cut practices that only cause problems.

For example:

#1 Exchange physical files for digital files (but don't forget to have a backup copy).

#2 Optimize your productivity with tool replacement. Swap regular WhatsApp for one most complete communication tool integrated with WhatsApp, such as PinkApp.

#3 Replace e-mail with a more dynamic and real-time internal communication tool, to avoid the cordless telephone, but which also makes it possible to leave messages for the next day, teamwork makes the difference.

#4 Stop using WhatsApp as a database, it's not the right place to keep files and record conversations, you need something more secure so you don't lose a single piece of data.

In other words, cut everything that causes rework and use tools to optimizing the production, but rest assured, we are still going to talk about tools in this text.

TRANSPARENCY

We have already talked here on the blog about transparency when we talk about organizational culture. So I'm not going to tire you out repeating everything here, but in case you haven't read it yet, I recommend consulting because it's a full content on the subject.

When you have a communication clear and transparent with employees, there is NO cordless telephone, there are NO rivalries, and most of all, there is NO competition.

In this business universe, all employees are pieces of a puzzle and all are equally important.

But transparency goes beyond the internal, Transparency overflows to your customer.

Then, be clear about the procedures adopted, the time required for a certain action, etc., when you are clear with your client, they understand the process better and make communication easier and more friendly.

And nothing beats putting yourself in the other's place with...

ATTENTION

Here, when we talk about attention, we are also talking about agility and empathy.

Agility at the time of the first service is a strong indicator of quality.

After all, who likes to wait hours to be treated or even longer for the problem to be solved?

No one!

Therefore, having the metric of which calls are resolved with just one service or how many calls were needed for that particular customer problem to be solved is fundamental to your analysis process.

But we will return to this subject later in this text.

But in addition to the agility to solve a problem, empathy is important.

As you've seen in the sales text using the FBI technique, empathy is more than smiling and agreeing or feeling sorry for anyone.

Empathy is seeing another's problem and putting yourself in place to solve it as quickly and efficiently as possible.

Thus, based on sympathy (and a great tip to show this in audio or text is to genuinely smile while providing the service) and empathy, your customer service will surely be highly rated.

This is not an easy practice, but with time and with the right environment it is possible, speaking in a work environment...

BIOSPHERE

Speaking about the environment, let's get to one fact:

Happy employees are more productive and efficient.

So, you need happy employees, so they will be more productive and, as a result, they will respond with more empathy and in a more helpful manner.

Because the way in which your employee needs to respond is with a smile on their face, as mentioned above and in the text of closing new contracts for accounting firms. So...

How can someone unhappy answer with a smile on their face?

The answer is: you can't. To serve with joy and a smile on your face, the ideal is to have a good work environment.

In addition, another important point is to have a...

INTELLIGENCE

Now that you've organized the house, you already have everything you needed to structure, be it the way your team is organized, the attention to service and the customer, it's necessary to extract intelligence from your learning based on attempts and make the next steps more assertive based on metrics.

That's why...

There are two types of important metrics that need to guide new proposals for improvements in both service and process: qualitative and quantitative metrics.

The qualitative metric can be observed at:

#1 NPS (Net Promoter Score)

How much would your client recommend your accounting firm to a friend?

In this form of measurement, it is possible to understand customer satisfaction using a scale from 0 to 10. This way you can assess who is a detractor, who is neutral, or who is a prosecutor and a “lawyer” from your accounting office, according to the book “The Definitive Question”.

This is a broader form of assessment that shows your customer's thinking about the company as a whole. But you can't predict when it will evaluate specific issues, such as quality of service, agility, and other points to have clear statistics.

#2 CAST (Customer Satisfaction Score)

When you use CSAT, on the other hand, there is an assertive view about points that need to be evaluated, for example, customer service.

So, let's look at questions we can use to evaluate your office:
#1 How was your experience with our service?

#2 How would you rate your experience with our accounting service so far?

But you don't have to use these two forms of assessment in isolation. They can (and should) coexist in a satisfaction survey sent to customers after each service.

For example: in the middle of the CSAT questions ask the question:

Considering your experience at our accounting office so far, how much would you recommend us to a friend?

Another important metric is the qualitative vision based on customer feedback and comments.

So you can see what you didn't have mapped from a different perspective and work on the comments reinforcing the positive points and correcting the negative ones.

You don't come from internal metrics Quantitative measures that are about care, it is very important to consider:
#1 Attendance quantities

#2 Service time

#3 Main issues

#4 Peak days and peak times

#5 Level of urgency of demand

Thus, based on the data collected in each sector, you as a manager can see if there is an overload of any employee or the need for hiring.

In addition, it is necessary Map the problems that are repeated and can be solved in another way to minimize demands.

For example:

Adding accounts manually can be replaced by an application where your customer has the autonomy to register accounts and is integrated into your accounting system, as is the case with Qipu.

After extracting the information, make comparative graphs month by month and note the changes made, so you can measure what is working and what still needs to be improved.

That way you will be able to...

LOYALTY

If you follow all of these steps you will have the your customer's loyalty and it will transform you into a lawyer for your brand and word of mouth will certainly increase more and more.

In addition, your own employees will also be proud to work in your office and will recommend both other clients and publicize the vacancies available when your company grows, thus bringing new talent to your staff.

So...

Using the C.O.N.T.A.B.I.L. method, you can easily structure your leadership, your service and manage the processes of your accounting office.

However, it's also worth adding tools here that can help you and your team to organize yourself better:

#1 Analysis Tool

This is a tool that you probably Do you already use it in your daily life and an example of this is Excel or Google Sheets.

However, you can use it beyond the basics for your clients. And here I'm not talking about the dynamic tables that your team knows how to make.

Use these spreadsheets for service analysis, make comparative graphs, have service dashboards, use the knowledge you already have to your advantage.

#2 Accounting management tool

You probably already have your favorite one, but if you don't use any accounting tools yet, be careful, because you should already have. They are important for the organization of documents by CPF or CNPJ and make your job easier. It is an investment that pays for its own use.

For this reason, I am going to leave a list of the main accounting tools here:

Note already: https://www.dpcomp.com.br/

E-Account: https://www.e-contab.com.br/

Infogr.am: https://infogram.com/

Nasajon:https://nasajon.com.br/escritorios-contabeis-solucoes/

Last but not least...

#3 Communication tool

Do you already use communication tools today, email and WhatsApp are two examples of this. However...

Email is an old way...

Let me give you an example:

In the past, people communicated by letters in a lengthy communication process in which they sent letters telling a fact and waiting for days for a response.

However, they revolutionized that waiting time for the letter with e-mail. The premise hasn't changed, it's still a form of letter. In other words, it is a document sent to someone with a beginning, middle, and end.

But today this is an outdated form, since companies have collaborative ways of working, especially if they adopt the model suggested here in the text of moving some employees to the service team.

For this reason, another free tool that you can use for this internal collaborative work and contact with the customer is WhatsApp. With it, your employees will be able to exchange documents, transfer of demand, and communication.

However, in the long term this is an expensive solution.

Why?

Because the app itself is free, but it needs a framework to work.

Each employee will need a corporate telephone that has an initial cost (price of the device and telephone line) and, in the long term, the cost of the telephone bill. In addition, if it is also used for customer service, it has an immaterial cost, that is, the disorganization, since you will lose control and visibility of the conversations.

Therefore, the best option is to use a tool that runs on the web integrated with WhatsApp, such as PinkApp.

Do you want to know more? See everything PinkApp can help your accounting firm with.

So you can consult the conversations, your attendants have an organized view and a triage bot to optimize the first service and improve your initial response time metrics.

So...

Starting from Ccourage, THEorganization, Nnecessary, Ttransparency, Aattention, Bbiosphere, Iintelligence, LActually, you will have a more optimized and organized office.

If you apply the C.O.N.T.A.B.I.L. method and surround your operation with the right tools, you will never again have a problem with disorganization, with the loss of customers, because of this, and your employees will have the right environment that stimulates productivity.