how to train clients

skip this, and both service and satisfaction decline.

by frank stitely
the relentless cpa

you’ll hate me after this post. i’m about to reveal that many of the behaviors that you rationalize as good client service are really just desperate measures to avoid losing bad clients. we’ll talk about getting out of that mess later.

more: avoiding projects hung up in process | when clients create errors | how we killed the tax season client meeting | why small firms can win the talent wars | there are no easy answers | how to thrive as a 21st-century firm | farm-aid for accountants? | whittle down wip
exclusively for pro members. log in here or 2022世界杯足球排名 today.

clients are trainable – at least as trainable as jack russell terriers. that is to say, they’re somewhat trainable. however, like jack russell terriers, you train clients or they’ll train you. somebody’s getting trained. here’s an example of how that works.

two days ago, a potential client called. i had already quoted a price for his tax returns, which was considerable. i was in a meeting. our admin staff offered to schedule a guaranteed time when we could talk. here was his reply:

“if i can’t speak to him immediately, i’ll take my business elsewhere.”

before we even began a relationship, he was trying to train me. he’s in charge, and i’ll do whatever he says, whenever he says. no. while i have never talked to him, i am picturing a british, elton john lookalike lecturing me:

“peasant, serve me. jump to it.”

we don’t do ambush meetings and phone calls. it’s wasteful of everyone’s time. we schedule meetings and phone calls. why do we schedule phone calls? i’m surprised that you’ve made it this far into my manifesto without internalizing it into your very being.

unscheduled phone calls are huge time wasters. first, you get to play a few rounds of phone tag. then you must switch from working on that 1031 exchange to whatever the person on the phone is blathering on about. that sounds harsh, but that’s what’s really happening in your mind during that call. your mind’s still on boot, while the person on the phone talks about buying a business. no one benefits from that call.

scheduled phone calls are respectful of the client’s time as well as yours. phone tag isn’t that much fun for them, either. you get to prepare for the call – meaning you google the topic and quickly become an expert on qualified opportunity zones. admit it. you do this. i do.

a set phone appointment and preparation time guarantee a valuable interaction. isn’t that what we’re after? your client is, too, and the smart ones understand this, particularly the successful ones, whose time matters as much as yours.

before we dive deeper into training clients, let’s discuss very specifically how training your clients increases firm efficiency. more directly, we’ll address how not training your clients reduces your level of client service and satisfaction.

let’s go back to our basic lean six sigma equation and see how not training your clients affects the equation. to repeat the equation:

turnaround time = wip / capacity

let’s plug in some “before numbers” for a person, not an entire firm, to keep the numbers simple.

wip = $10,000

capacity = $1,000 per day

staff billing rate = $125 per hour

billing day = 8 hours

therefore we know that this person’s turnaround time is 10 days. i have not explicitly stated this before, but i think this might be obvious. the equation applies not just to your entire firm but to your individual staff members, each of whom has separate variables for the equation. your firm’s equation is the sum of all of these individual equations.

i stopped to make this point because maximizing the performance of your firm requires that you maximize individual staff performance. you can use this as a tool when you are helping staff improve. i am having lunch with one of our staff to explain how letting 30-minute meetings turn into 60-minute meetings is hurting his billings. i am going to illustrate, using our equation, what happens when you put needless wip into our equation.

let’s develop some “after numbers” for our staff member, who lets two hours per day slip away into needless meetings and phone calls.

let’s start with what happens to capacity. two hours lost at $125 per hour equals $250 in lost capacity. let’s recalculate our turnaround with this new lower capacity:

turnaround time = $10,000 / $750 = 13 days

losing two hours per day causes a drop in turnaround time (client service) of three days.

at this point, your staff member says, “but if i cut these meetings short, the clients will be unhappy.”

this is wrong on two levels.

first, what about the happiness of all the clients in that $10,000 of wip? their happiness matters too.

i tell our admin staff when a client complains about not getting a meeting within 24 hours, “that’s one unhappy client. he isn’t the only client that we have. meetings aren’t the only work we do. tax returns don’t get prepared or reviewed when we’re in meetings. those other clients matter even though they’re not on the phone at the moment.”

if we don’t get the work of the “silent” clients done, they’ll leave. prioritizing clients who require meetings makes no sense. as we’ve noted 12,472 times so far, meetings and phone calls are productivity killers. when you have a meeting or phone call, something tangible must get accomplished with every minute.

second, your most successful business owners hate needless meetings as badly as you do. believing a meeting with us is the highlight of someone’s life and the purpose of his/her existence is narcissism. the lean six sigma equation applies to our clients’ lives as well. now that you understand this, help your clients lead more effective lives as well. they’ll be able to pay you higher rates.

the next point your staff member may make is that he’ll just work additional hours to make up for the lost time because of meetings. adding two potential works hours to the day adds capacity to our equation. spending that capacity in needless meetings still reduces turnaround time as that additional two hours could be used to prepare more tax returns. plug the additional hours into capacity as potential revenue and then remove them for meetings and turnaround time still goes down.

now, fire that staff member.

now that you see how the math works for training or not training clients, let’s talk training methods and how training is occurring whether you know it or not. it’s just bad training. here is an example of my stupidity.

i met with a client who was a software company executive. he had been a client for a dozen years, and people don’t get much smarter than he is. he drove from alexandria, virginia to chantilly, virginia every year. the drive is 20 miles and might seem like a 30-minute trip, but in northern virginia, it’s more like an hour – on a good day, non-rush hour.

he said, “frank, with this portal thing that you have, do i really have to come out here to hand over my tax documents? no offense. i like our visits, but it’s a long drive.”

in other words, i’m a nice guy, but not worth traveling 60 minutes to see.

he continued, “you have this portal thing where i can upload files after you post questions for me. why can’t i just upload my documents there to start the process?”

i was … well, embarrassed is probably the best non-french word. in 10 seconds, he unlocked a view of our process that maybe only an outsider could see.

we had clients posting their documents to what is now clarity practice management for a few years before this conversation. so that concept wasn’t new to me.

what was new was the idea that clients come to meetings not because they want meetings, but because we schedule the meetings. if you schedule it, they will come.

this client never before objected to the meetings, because he was a smart guy.  he thought the meetings were an essential part of our workflow. as a fellow executive, he wanted to be respectful of our processes.

in other words, we trained him to come to meetings that he didn’t want – and we didn’t either. this is what i mean by unintentional training. with every interaction, you train clients to do something. maybe that something should be something you value.

let’s compile a list of the client behaviors that we want to encourage:

1. bring their tax documents earlier
2. schedule only productive meetings
3. eliminate ambush meetings and phone calls
4. communicate electronically, not through phone calls and unsafe emails
5. stop non-tax season service requests “i know you’re busy but …”
6. pay for tax planning
7. follow your firm processes

we could add to this list, but this is an excellent start. next, let’s discuss training methods.

bring their tax documents in earlier.

we accomplish this through a series of e-blasts explaining our deadlines. the e-blasts start in december and we call them “countdown to tax season.” they cover much more than just our deadlines for clients to provide documents for business and personal income tax returns.

we use the blasts to train clients in other areas – such as minimizing the use of staples when they give us their documents. we also discourage people from putting their documents in three-ring binders. as i’m certain you already know, staples and binders drive your admin staff crazy when they’re trying to scan documents.

the key to these e-blasts is humor. many of these e-blasts come from “the tax lady.” the tax lady is the church lady from saturday night live with my wig-adorned head photoshopped in. the e-blasts are written in her voice. the blast about staples talks about the need to conserve the world’s supply of staples for future generations. steel is expensive and damages the environment. think about that the next time you pick up that stapler.

our tax document deadline blast happens in late december or early january. for businesses, we follow up with a “do you know where your bookkeeper is?” blast. this targets business owners with bookkeepers who do little all year and then spend january and february trying to prepare the prior year’s books. we know that leads to late and lousy records for income tax preparation.

we know that last one works, because we get pushback from the bookkeepers. shame is a powerful tool, particularly when done with humor and sarcasm’s special sauce. we have clients compete to be the the first to get their corporate tax returns prepared in january.

as further reinforcement for our training, our engagement letter provides for a surcharge on tax returns prepared after our document deadlines. we offer a $50 credit for people who voluntarily go on extension before we start working on their returns. this discourages people from dropping off a couple of documents and proclaiming that they met our deadline. the $50 credit gives them a reason to avoid that charade.

schedule only productive meetings.

by now, you had better be on board with the concept that meetings can be a huge waste of productive time. our first salvo in the war against useless meetings was surrender. rather than tell people that we weren’t going to schedule useless meetings, we just stopped scheduling them.

if you schedule meetings, they will come. we stopped scheduling tax season meetings to get tax documents. we feared a tsunami of phone calls in late march to schedule that never came. our phone volume actually decreased from a lower volume of phone calls to reschedule the meetings that we had scheduled.

before we were married, my wife used a different tax preparer. i know what you’re thinking. laura didn’t marry me for my good looks. she married me to get a lifetime of free tax returns. that’s possible. she was maxing out her 401(k) before i came along. i told her i found that sexy. i still do.

every year she trekked to her tax preparer’s office to have the annual tax meeting where she dutifully handed across the table one form at a time at the request of the preparer. her preparer thought this exercise the height of great client service, that is – boring the crap out of a client who needed to be other places.

laura was a single mom who needed her time back to do minor things like pick up her daughter from day care, or maybe spend the evening with her daughter, or help with homework. compare all of those alternatives to meeting with a tax preparer to hand over paper documents one at a time. pick the least important activity. i’ll wait. … this brings a little perspective to who actually wants meetings, doesn’t it?

laura knows a lot about my firm. we spend time in the mornings talking about work while she does stuff with her hair for at least eight hours before work. land wars in asia have been won in less time.

she has told me many times what a great deal she thinks we have for people. they can post all of their documents to clarity practice management, and we take it from there. clients get hours of time back in their lives.

i mentioned that sometimes we are the ones who get trained. sometimes we are the ones who need the training. stop wasting clients’ time. consider yourself trained.

avoid ambush meetings and phone calls.

this one is really easy in theory, but really difficult if you have trained your clients to expect these over a period of years. ambush meetings and phone calls are unscheduled events. clients just walk in with a tax document and want to say, “hello.”

this morphs into, “quick question while i’m here …” fifteen productive minutes escape your life, which is really 30 minutes when you consider the mental time you need to switch back into the task that was interrupted.

the easy answer is to not allow unscheduled meetings and phone calls. when did you last walk unscheduled into your doctor’s office and ask a quick question? have you ever done this to your lawyer? you can’t even drop in to speak to an auto mechanic. why should clients be allowed to drop in on you?

the answer is training. you have in your head that always being available is great client service. but it’s not. what about the client whose work was interrupted by an ambush meeting? was this great service to him/her? how easy is it to jump right back into calculating the boot on a 1031 exchange after an ambush discussion on estate tax planning? you trained your clients to interrupt you.

untraining is always harder than training. that client of 20 years barges by your receptionist with, “we go way back. he’ll see me.” giving your admin staff glocks will stop this, but may seem a bit of overkill. you’ll run out of places to bury the bodies eventually. we settled on tranquilizer darts. then we drop them off outside strip joints – naked. this is effective training – especially for the guys.

the way to train clients to avoid ambush meetings and phone calls is to be unavailable for them. instruct your admin staff that that you’re always in a meeting or on a call when someone asks to interrupt. my telephone has been on “do not disturb” for months at a time.

most clients only need to experience this once to understand that showing up without an appointment won’t lead to satisfaction. the next time that they have something to discuss, they’ll schedule an appointment time.

obviously, this tactic works best if clients can’t see you polishing your shoes. think about this when you choose an office. glass walls look beautiful, but consider how goldfish feel when they’re always on display.

communicate electronically, not through phone calls and unsafe emails.

why do people call you on the phone? because they want fast answers. many if not most cpas answer emails once per day or maybe twice. time management gurus taught us this alleged time-saving principle from the early days of email. don’t interrupt your day multiple times by answering the call of the “you’ve got mail” icon.

we’ve unwittingly trained clients to believe they’ll get faster responses with phone calls than electronic communications.

after reading a few of my posts, you now know the issue with phone calls is interruption. you can choose when to answer client emails, but you can’t choose when clients call.

how do we train clients to reduce phone calls and communicate electronically? we train them by flipping our response times in favor of electronic communications over phone calls. we do this using the basic psychological principle of reinforcement. we reinforce the behavior we desire.

respond to electronic communications before phone calls. our admin staff takes a message from a caller while letting the caller know that i’m in and out of meetings all day. sending an electronic message may get a faster response. then magically, i respond to the electronic message instead of calling. i reinforce the concept that electronic communication gets a faster response than calling.

you might be wondering why i’m using the term “electronic communication” instead of “email.” email as a business tool is doomed. last summer, the ceo of slack predicted the demise of business email in five years. i think he’s wrong. i think business email maybe has another two years. there are two obvious reasons why email has a foot in the technological grave.

first, spam killed the efficiency of email. how much time do you spend each day deleting spam? you can train your spam blocker, but the professional spammers get through using variable email addresses and agreements with internet routing companies. you know who these professional spammers are. you probably use one to send e-blasts or client surveys. if i mention them by name, you’ll soon hear about my mysterious suicide.

if you used your company exchange server to send the volume of email that these companies do, servers around the world would begin blocking your messages in a day. in fact, your email volume doesn’t get very high before this blocking happens. soon very few of your messages, marketing or otherwise, reach their destinations.

ask me how i know. i learned about pay to play in the spam world. during our first foray into sending e-blasts to clients, we sent them directly from our server. a german routing company began blocking our messages almost right away. we weren’t sending millions of messages, we were sending a couple hundred to existing clients. soon they were blocking all of our messages, even the routine ones. to get unblocked, we could submit an application to the german company and wait two to four weeks for processing or send them $600 for expedited service. you thought the nazis were gone? now they run internet routing services.

the professional spammers pay routing companies to not block their messages.

as a result, you still get hundreds of junk messages each day despite your spam blocker. deleting these messages robs you of productive time. thus, email has lost most of its efficiency as a mode of communication.

second, email is dangerous. last tax season, we got a least a dozen infected messages every day. the criminals are getting good. sometimes they post as prospective clients. sometimes they spoof existing clients.

ransomware is the scariest of the dangers. ask the city of baltimore. as i write this, they are still recovering from an attack this summer. they were reduced to carrying out most government functions on paper. they refused to pay the cybercriminals. do you think they should have? well – if you can’t trust cybercriminals, who can you trust?

if you accept enough e-mail attachments in your firm, you will eventually succumb to malware of some sort. some late night in march, a tax preparer will click on that attachment she didn’t know was coming from a client to see what it is. then you are done.

what’s the electronic alternative to email? again i know a guy, but you’re probably getting tired of reading that. in another post, i cover the qualities a practice management system should have. right now, i’m going to stick to just the communications components.

first, you must be able to communicate with clients behind a firewall with no outside intruders. the danger with email is that anyone can enter your inbox. you need a system where you know the identities of the participants.

finally, you need alerts when clients are trying to reach you. i wrote about prioritizing electronic communications. a communications system is worthless if you can’t quickly respond to clients. i like alerts in a dashboard where i can prioritize responding to the $10,000 client over the $500 client. the key is that you can choose to be responsive and to whom you will respond. you are in control.

posted on december 30, 2020