mitch reno: client experience advantage goes to small firms | gear up for growth

jean caragher  00:04

hello. thank you for joining in for gear up for growth powered by 卡塔尔世界杯常规比赛时间. i’m gene carragher, president of capstone marketing and your host. this episode is focused on creating a differentiated client experience. our guest is mitchell reno a principal at raymond mitch, served as the firm’s chief marketing and sales officer for 14 years, then in 2015 he transitioned into the role of director of client experience. mitch, welcome to gear up for growth.

mitch reno  00:38

thank you, jean, great to be here.

jean caragher  00:41

so let’s start at the beginning. how do you define client experience?

mitch reno  00:49

great question. i think that’s something that most people are just confused about. i think most people think of client experience as providing good service, and that’s certainly a part of a great client experience, but certainly not what we need to manage to create an engineer good client experiences over time. so here’s how i like to think of it. it’s it’s both broad, but it is very well defined. and that is a client experience is each and every touch point from all components of the experience that we have with clients, from their first interaction with the organization through their final interaction with the organization. so it’s really looking at what whether those are technical, human, business process, deliverables, pricing, all of those different components make up what that ultimate client experience is. and if you want to measure what that means, it’s really what clients think and feel collectively about all of those different experiences, right? so, so when a firm starts to create a client experience program, just in those elements that you listed, there are many more touch points than we normally think of, right? absolutely there. there absolutely are. so when you really begin to dig in and study and think about client experience, one of the the processes professionals within the the customer experience industry look at are journey maps, and they’re really looking at every moment and every experience that a client is collectively gathering across time and and how they’re interfacing, which are the moments that create wow and value, which are the moments that create friction and challenge for the clients. and so it’s really looking at each and every one of those moments and how people think and feel about them right now. in a prior conversation we had, you mentioned that client experience can become a key differentiator. you said that it’s not about imitating anyone else, it’s about defining that differentiated, special experience that a firm can be known for. can you speak a little bit more to us about that thought of differentiation? oh, absolutely, one of the challenges that we have today when we look at client experience, and think of it as providing good experience or good good service is we limit it to just that interactive component and service standards that we try to deploy consistently. and if i a client tells me they’re happy, i think we’re creating a great client experience. but go to any website and go to any organization, and all of them will tell you they provide and have evidence of of some sort of of client satisfaction, right? but how do you then move from what most of our profession provides which is good, good service. how do you move to a great experience? i think creating a differentiated experience is made up of truly understanding how you’re designing and engineering, how you do your work with your clients, and the experience that you’re creating for them and identifying along that journey. what are the components that we can do different from the competitors that will make us memorable and have us be known as is the firm that does this very well, and so what are some of those things that you could differentiate yourself? well, where are some of the points of friction pricing we’re seeing, seeing a lot of different firms today evaluate different ways to approach pricing so that they can use that as a differentiator in the experience onboarding, there’s a moment in time in the client journey that most people have felt within the profession, we’re not handling properly. so firms are focused now on saying, hey, we want our firm to do a better job at that so that it really creates a standout experience, that at the opening of every new relationship, something special and unique and different is happening. and when people talk about us in the marketplace, they’re going to be saying, wow, i i’ve hired a number of wealth advisors or technology specialists or accounting professionals. and i gotta tell you, when i talk to the folks at raymond and we got started, it was a whole different experience when we started working with them. so they’re all those different moments. what what any managing partner listening, or any marketing leader or growth leader within an organization needs to be hearing is, let’s look at what we do well, let’s look at where there’s an opportunity for us to do something better, and let’s do that better and differently than the rest of our peers that we compete against, right? because this could be as something as simple as,

jean caragher  06:51

how are they greeted in the office, or how frequently do they receive communication from the firm about pertinent you know, information. so a lot of this is not rocket science, right it, but it really is pulling together all of these elements to create that overall experience that is absolutely for the client service. like you were saying earlier in my in my career, over 23 years i’ve been able to collect and review about 35,000

mitch reno  07:27

client survey feedbacks and done more than 1000 personal interviews with clients. so i think that i’ve done a fairly good job of being a listener, and when i look at that information collectively and compare to the profession and the industry, i can tell you a few things about what clients need and demand. the number one thing that our clients within this profession really require of us, and it’s simple, it’s responsiveness and accessibility to us that’s the number one driver of satisfaction. another big driver of satisfaction is feeling understood, understanding a client’s needs, goals and objectives and helping them achieve those then the second biggest driver i’ve i’ve measured over the years and that we have focused on, on driving. a lot of people think it’s going to be quality deliverables, some of those, those issues, but those are, are the top two that seem to drive the secret, probably driver of satisfaction that most professional advisory firms today want to try to aspire to is proactivity satisfaction, likelihood to refer is going to be driven in the future by those advisors who are bringing fresh new ideas to the table on an ongoing basis. and so when we talk about designing a client experience, think about being the firm that across all the different touch points that you have within a year with a client, that you’re the firm that brings a new idea to the table every time you interact with the client, that every associate, no matter what level within the organization, that they know their mission is to come into an interaction with a client, with fresh thinking, a fresh idea, an insight from industry, something that will make the client understand. i’m thinking about you today and tomorrow, and i want to help you be more successful, right? that’s such an important point you just made, because.

jean caragher  10:00

because it also goes along with what we’ve been talking about for decades, frankly, that cpas need to be more advisory in nature. and there are plenty of cpas who are fantastic advisors, and there are also a lot who think they are, but their idea of being advisory is the client called me with this question, and i answered it and, and that is not being advisory, right? that that’s being an order taker, you know, if you will. i’ve worked on and and designed a lot of customized training on how to build relationships with clients, and one of my favorite simple points in delivering better experiences and deepening relationships with clients is really founded in it. it matters less what you say and matters far more what you ask, the quality of your questions earn you the designation of a great advisor, not walking in and necessarily surprising them with the right technical response, right i was going to, i wanted to touch on that point about the training, because that is critical to everything. of course, our backgrounds, you know, we were focused war young on business development training, you know, and other types of, you know, soft skills training. and, you know, not everybody likes that term soft skills, but if you’re setting the expectation of your people that they need to be more proactive, and they need to bring new ideas to client meetings. you have to arm them with the training and the experience and the mentoring in order for them to do that effectively.

mitch reno  12:56

absolutely. and i probably should have brought this up earlier in the conversation, but if i’m an equity owner or a managing partner of a firm, no matter what size, because the beauty of client experience can be applied at any size organization. and i always say it’s easier as a smaller organization to implement client experience improvements and change them at large scale organizations that are in the top, top 100 harder the bigger you get, right? but i would a managing partner want to invest in something like client experience, which requires some investment in training, okay, and development. why would you want to do that? well, our friends at clearly rated, which does a beautiful job with client experience and and listening programs, did an analysis of the ipa results between 2019 and 2023 they looked at all of those organizations that they could identify knowing they had active client experience programs and investments. and when they studied those, they looked at the the average growth rates over a four year period for those firms that had client experience programs versus those that did not, and they found that those with client experience programs had at 19% average growth rate, higher than than those that did not. so there’s a strong motivation in saying, do i need to understand what client experience means at our organization? do i need to understand where it fits within our organization? where will we deploy and try to create a defined, differentiated experience, and how will we manage toward that, which includes training? right? so your question about training is, once we’ve listened to our clients and understood clearly what we’re doing well and identified those points where we could do something different and better. how do i build that and implement it and measure and manage that over time? that’s of course, you know, the becomes, the secret sauce is the implementation and execution of that type of improvement. and frankly, and in partnerships, it’s harder to do that than it oftentimes is in, you know, traditional corporate environments where this is how we’re going to do it, this is the standard operating procedure, and this is, this is how do it, where we’re going to do it, yeah, and partnerships, you know, you have a little bit more flexibility with the partner that says, oh, that’s a nice thing. i know. no, thank you. yeah, so that is a challenge, right? in corporate world, they don’t get a vote, right? i mean,

jean caragher  14:56

every one of them gets a vote, so, yeah, bigger challenge. right for folks who are leading that effort, something we we’ve kind of touched upon is data and collecting and analyzing all of the data that you’re collecting as part of your client experience. and again, we’ve talked about this before, and this is another one of those areas where you said it’s easier for the smaller firms to do that simply because they are smaller, perhaps more nimble, than a large, multi office cpa firm.

mitch reno  15:40

oh, absolutely. and for so many reasons, data that defines who our clients are, and then the data that we collect of their thoughts and views and and feedback around us is, is so, so critical. so if we’re we’re looking at data governance as as organizations, we’ve got to do a better job at building that warehouse of information that we have about our clients and knowing who they are, documenting that beautifully within our systems, knowing what they’re buying and understanding what the future potential services we might be able to provide them, blending with that the listening capabilities, whether that’s through personal interviews or surveys or focus groups, really to pull information in to understand where we can make improvements, what we’re doing well, that we can do better, and where are the opportunities to really accrete and grow relationships with clients. data will govern our future, and it’s probably even more critical as we look at how technology is going to impact the client experience and in the world of client experience and customer experience professionals. we call it user experience. so what are all of those user interfaces that we create for the client that shape their opinion of us, whether it’s a document sharing system or an electronic invoicing system or the software that we’re working with them, with our accounting outsourcing areas, all of those different elements begin to build and are dependent on good data, and that technology is going to shape our ability to use artificial intelligence in the future. so artificial intelligence will only be as good as the data that’s being fed into it. today, we’re in that phase with artificial intelligence of while it’s amazing, it still needs good prompts and guidance and good analysis that the information that it’s providing is accurate and applicable. that’s going to change in the future. however, if we don’t have clean information to input into those tools, we’re not going to be able to leverage them. so as a profession, my fear is we’re behind the eight ball. but i do see a lot of organizations that are working on data governance. i see a lot of them establishing and building departments around it in large scale organizations, all of that will scale down to smaller and smaller firms.

jean caragher  18:43

so some of our viewers or listeners may be thinking, gosh, i really do need to look more into this client experience, thing you know, for our firms, and maybe feeling a little overwhelmed with it all. so i think one of the points is that you need to start somewhere, right the whoever’s leading that effort that needs to start somewhere. what is your recommendation for firm leadership? you know, in creating a client experience program, what’s, what’s the first thing that they should do?

mitch reno  19:26

i think this is probably the easiest part of of launching a program, and that is, begin with trying to understand where your firm is today with regard to the client experience. so mitch, we don’t have a client experience program. what, you know? what? what do you mean? i think it begins with asking the clients to describe it. i just conducted an interview today with a client was about 50 minutes long, and i.

   c 20:00

i had never met the client before, but i do these independent interviews with them. and my first question is, you know, if we were sitting at a table overlooking a golf course, of course, you have to tie into what they’re interested in. and i do a little research there. if you were sitting at the golf course and and having a refreshment. what would you tell me it’s like working with our organization? and so i begin there with the dialog of trying to understand how a client describes working with us, and then dig in. so if i’m a managing partner of a cpa firm, and i’m not meeting with one of my top right fit clients every week and having a conversation about not digging into the work that we’re currently doing, but let’s talk and look at the overall experience with our organization and how we are helping you achieve your your most important goals and aspirations, if, if i’m a leader and not taking time to do that, i’m missing a huge opportunity and and so when people say, well, i want to rush into client experience programming and tell me what i can do, so that when i’m at the next meeting with my peers, i can say, yep, we launched our client experience program. i say pause, dig in deep to understand, begin to be able to map out what clients are really saying about what you are doing today. well, where those points of friction may be and where those opportunities are for some organizations, it may be looking at a particular part of the business, look at a particular group of clients, of privately held businesses, for example, and saying, okay, we want to look at how our privately held businesses and the work that we do, not just for the business, but for them as private clients, we want to understand them and figure out where are the potential opportunities for improvement. what comes out of that are two sets of data, data that says we have some friction points that could be improved. now let’s ideate alone as a firm and then with the clients on fixing those friction points so that we can create a better client experience. and the other data set is, is the potential? what were the ideas that came out of the conversation that we could do something, perhaps completely differently or better, that adds value to the experience, that, again, will differentiate us in the marketplace and make clients want to say, this is what it’s like to work with a team from forbis or moss adams or i bailey or whip flake, you know, all of those different defined experiences and moments that can be managed, right? so those out of that listening strategy comes, what do we need to fix to make it better? and what can we possibly add or re engineer the way we do something to really make it special and seem different people from outside the industry, some of the best thought leaders are saying, people from outside our profession may want to come in and really be disruptors and and, you know, for example, we’re probably going to see some technology companies coming in and saying, hey, we can do this, some of these accounting activities better than a cpa firm. you don’t need a cpa firm to do them. wealth businesses. you don’t need them to do your taxes. we’ve built, we’re building a better mouse trap for how you’re going to be having your personal taxes done. there are going to be a number of things coming in, including just simple technology innovations that are going to come in and disrupt what we have really had as our bread and butter, and so we have to be prepared if we want to remain as independent firms within the profession to use client experience as an opportunity to build something so special that people don’t want an alternative, right, right? that is so powerful

jean caragher  24:41

now we’ve seen a few of our marketing colleagues, you know, you included, you know, make that switch from marketing to client experience. so i guess this is two questions. if a firm has a marketing director, you. is that the person who should lead client experience, and if they don’t have a marketing professional who is the right person to lead,

mitch reno  25:10

i think this is a really exciting opportunity for managing partners to look at how and where they want to make a change and make difference happen, right? i don’t think it has to be in a marketing or sales function. you can focus on where you want to make the the change the impact occur, to influence and re engineering that client experience and embed that role where it can make the most difference. it could be in some type of administrative operations role. we see a number of firms saying, well, we need an innovation leader. that innovation leader, driven from a client centric standpoint, can be focusing not just on implementing innovation to create operational efficiencies, but can be implementing operational efficiencies that are driven by improved client experience, that understanding we need to re engineer how we’re working with the client, not first for operational efficiency, but first to create a better experience for the client. i think when you look at it from those perspectives of, where do we need to engineer, where do we need to reduce friction, you can, in fact, allow that role to be in different departments. what’s interesting in my role in the firm, and i don’t have any other people report to me, is that i work with all of the departments i report into a chief growth officer, but i am working with every department. the majority of my time is not spent with marketing, sales, business development at all, and that’s an important part of the client experience at the front end. but what firms need to focus on isn’t necessarily where you know marketing might be focusing on attracting business, but instead, let’s focus on client experience, where operationally, all the interfaces are happening right, and what can we do to try drive and improve that and reduce friction?

jean caragher  27:33

mitch, this conversation is fascinating. i have one bonus question for you, so when michigan state and the university of michigan play each other in football, who do you root for?

mitch reno  28:13

that’s an easy question, because i always want to be a winner, so i’m, i’m rooting for whoever is higher in the rankings, right? so as having my undergrad from the university of michigan, and course, we all know they were the world champions last year, national champions, going undefeated michigan versus everybody. ad then, of course, during my graduate work at michigan state university, it’s always good on those game days to wear a t shirt from one and a sweatshirt from the other, and whoever’s higher ranked, i’m hoping that that team continues to move up the rankings. oh, gosh, and well, that seems like a good strategy, and i know you really enjoy michigan sports. i do awesome.

jean caragher  28:42

well, we’ve been speaking today with mitch, reno, director of client experience. thank you, mitch, it is always so fun to talk with you. likewise gene, thank you and thank you for tuning in to gear up for growth. be sure to check us out next time when we focus on another crucial topic for accounting firms aiming for smart growth in today’s competitive marketplace. i’ll see you then you.