How To Keep Clients in the Loop During the Busy Season and Why You Should Care

Does your firm focus on client retention during the tax season? According to research, it costs significantly more to win new clients than to keep existing ones, and yet, 90% of accounting firms lose clients due to a lack of clear communication and guidance. If you don’t keep your clients up to date with the status of their return, they will be trying to reach out to you, worried about their businesses. Not having clear answers and facing uncertainty, they are more likely to switch to a different company.  

Automating your client communications can nurture your client engagement. It can also help balance the workload during the high season, increase your client retention rate and grow your client base through reviews. 

In this article, we share an example of how you can automate your client communications with TaxDome, an all-in-one practice management software for tax practitioners and accounting firms. More communications doesn’t mean more work with leveraging tools, like TaxDome. 

Check out how Randy Joseph & Deva Hetrick of Joseph & Hetrick, LLC automated their tax business while keeping clients updated during every step of the communication.

How to define when to inform clients

Let’s break down your tax prep process steps and see where your clients need attention.

Here are the most popular among TaxDome clients’ steps in the client communication process. You can copy the sequence as it is, or adapt it to your own client relationship strategy:    

In TaxDome, you can specify actions, after which your clients get automated notifications. You can tell them that you have received their documents or payments or describe the upcoming steps of in the process. 

How your client communication can work automatically

Let’s get back to the scheme above and see what your automated client communication may look like.

Build trust with new clients

You can start building relationships with new clients during the onboarding process. For example, in the welcome email you can promote your services, including pricing and other clients’ reviews. You can explain what has changed in your business during the last year, such as working remotely or switching to different office hours.

You can also educate your clients and include educational materials in the welcome email on how to use the client portal and not getting lost in its functionality. 

Ready-made email template that TaxDome users can copy and customize.

Follow up on clients when they perform specific actions 

A lot of your work depends on clients performing specific actions, such as: sending you documents, providing e-signatures, approving documents, settling payments. Once clients finish these actions, you can automatically inform them that you have received their documents, payments, etc. There is no need for the client to call you worrying whether you received their payment.

For example, once a client submits your tax organizer (you can have them upload files right there), they get an automated email informing them about the timelines and managing their expectations. All these happen without you lifting a finger.

Ready-made email template that is sent after client uploads documents.

Check out how Michelle Cook of Carter CPAs improves client communications by adding visual descriptions of where the clients are in the process.

How to start automating client communications

 1. Define the steps you want to inform your clients about. You can use the scheme above or see how your peers have automated this process.

Learn how Brian Newman of Brian Newman CPA created his first sequence of automations that cover every action from lead capture to offboarding.

 2. Create message or email templates that clients will receive at each touchpoint of your process. In TaxDome, you can copy templates from the library or ask your peers to share their examples. 

For younger clients, we recommend using secure messages. It’s like texting in WhatsApp but is secure and incorporated into your CRM. They can also upload documents from their phone to the thread and they can autosave to their file without you downloading and uploading them from multiple tools. 

 3. When you’re done creating the process, you can visualize it in TaxDome workflows.

 4. If you’re a TaxDome user and need help setting up TaxDome workflows and automations, feel free to book a white-label onboarding session with screen-sharing or watch our webinar on advanced workflow automation.

As a result, your clients will be happy about being informed in a timely manner. Even if you are not currently doing any active work at the moment, they will appreciate knowing they are on your radar. 

Automation can ensure efficient client communication workflow that will reduce questions and phone calls, freeing you up to get the money-making work done. Realizing a thought-out client engagement strategy during the tax season is much easier with TaxDome.