Across all industries, technology has seen exponential growth in recent times. With this expansion comes the risk of adopting new solutions that don’t fit the ways that your organization builds client relationships and wins work.
This is particularly evident in professional services like the legal, accounting, and consulting industries. As professional advisors, winning mandates from clients isn’t quite the same as being a salesperson. As a result of the unique needs of partnerships, leading firms are trying to solve for their clients’ most pressing business issues across the client lifecycle — not purely from a sales perspective.
Asking the Right Questions to Inform Your Investment Decisions
Imagine that you are considering a home purchase. You’ve found what appears to be a great deal with respect to what you need: space for the kids, proximity to good schools, and a familiar neighborhood. You may, however, have forgotten other important factors such as capital growth potential, proximity to work, or even access to career opportunities.
As with many significant investments in life, determining what value you’re seeking — and contrasting this to the cost side of the equation — is often complex. We believe a variety of aspects should be carefully considered when it relates to your firm’s investments in client management.
For example, which supporting technologies should be considered when trying to enable the business outcomes of differentiated client experiences, deeper client relationships and increase revenues? What questions should your technology partners answer to inform your investment decisions?
Differentiated Client Experiences
Which supporting technologies enable this outcome?
- Client Journey Empathy: Understanding the nature of the client-advisor dynamic
- Frictionless End-User Experience: Making it easier to do the right thing and harder to do the wrong thing
- Enabling of Moments that Matter: Tracking the moments that matter to clients and solving for them
What questions should your technology partners be able to answer?
- How does your understanding of professional services influence your development roadmap?
- How do you support the way professional advisors work? Does the package include Microsoft Outlook and mobile access?
- How do you track client satisfaction for account nurturing, pitching, engagement delivery, and closure?
Deeper Client Relationships
Which supporting technologies enable this outcome?
- Industry-Specific Ways of Working: Implementing templated best practices for client lifecycle management
- Firmwide Social Capital: Accessing intelligence across firm-client relationships
- Connected Data: Taking advantage of data across the client lifecycle
What questions should your technology partners be able to answer?
- How can you accelerate time to value through best practices that are available based on your experience with similar firms?
- How do you measure social capital and the interrelationships across firms and their clients?
- What existing data architecture is available for me to leverage across the client engagement lifecycle?
Increased Revenue
Which supporting technologies enable this outcome?
- Connected Sales Flow: Integrating across marketing, client account management, and pitching
- Seamless Configurability: Accessing no-code configurations to drive business agility
- Insightful Analytics: Building actionable intelligence that gets your teams from A to B
- Standardized Connectivity: Deploying integrations to other industry specific technologies
What questions should your technology partners be able to answer?
- How do your standard reports accommodate the practice, industry, and geography structures of my firm?
- How many resources will I need to commit to ongoing management of the technology solution?
- What approaches (e.g., nudging) does your solution support to enable insight while influencing behavior?
- Which integrations (e.g., with financial management systems) come as standard with your technology?
Based on our extensive experience with leading firms, some leading industry-agnostic technologies on a like-for-like basis not only sacrifice important factors for client management but are more costly, too.
And Finally… Don’t Forget Time to Value
The current economic climate highlights the need to prove greater value more quickly. You should, therefore, consider the following questions when determining how to deploy your client management investment:
- How can I accelerate time to value without reinventing the wheel during solution configuration and data migration?
- How can I minimize the cost and duration of reconfiguration efforts and ongoing management of the solution to keep my solution relevant to the way our firm works?
For a more in-depth conversation about this topic, or should you need support assessing your firm’s needs in this space, please get in touch.