In Practice
Listening to Your Clients
By Joe Rotella, Delphina Consulting
Aug 17, 2010 - 10:27:42 AM

You’ve probably heard the statistic many times. The most significant reason clients leave one accountant for another, coming in at a whopping 68 percent, is “perceived indifference.” Simply put, clients don’t feel like their accountant cares about them.

Clients want to be heard and want to know you understand their needs and wants. If you’ve worked to position yourself as their “trusted advisor” they may even expect you to know their needs and wants better than they do. Showing that you really understand your clients and their industries can help you deliver exceptional service – the kind of service that separates you from your competitors and creates intensely loyal clients.
 
The incredible surge of social media means more and more people, including your clients, are sharing their thoughts and feelings on the Web. And, it continues to gain momentum. While individual sites or tools come and go, the overall trend is toward faster and faster adoption of social media. According to survey of 2,253 adults by Pew Internet & American Life Project, one third (35%) of adult Internet users have created a profile on an online social network. This is four times as many as three years ago.

How do you listen to all the chatter on the Web and find what’s important to your clients and your industries?

4 Free Tools to Help You Listen to the Web

1. Google Alerts
Set up alerts to monitor your top tier clients as well as your practice name and the names of your client-facing staff. Google does the work of crawling the Web to find mentions and sends that information to your inbox.

2. LinkedIn Network Updates
As you build your LinkedIn network, include your clients. Your network updates will begin to provide insights into their world. Profile updates could indicate a single promotion or reveal a broader reorganization. Status updates often include glimpses into current projects. Events could show you where your clients are going to get their information

3. Monitter
It seems like everyone is sending a 140-character “tweet” on Twitter about everything from what they did that morning to an interesting article they read. Keeping track of it can be overwhelming. Beyond the integrated search of Twitter apps like Twhirl and TweetDeck, Monitter (www.monitter.com) provides real-time monitoring of the Twittersphere.

4. Technorati
Billed as the “leading blog search engine,” Technorati helps you find postings that can provide insights to challenges your clients are facing or what industry trends are heading their way.

Tune your listening skills to focus on information you can use. Listening to everything all your clients say on the Web would be nice, but unrealistic. Focus on your most profitable clients and on things you can use to make a difference in your service delivery.

5 Things to Listen for on Social Media

1. Complaints
Some clients have trouble being candid with their service provider, no matter how many times we ask if they are OK. Unfortunately, some of those customers have no trouble posting their frustration on the Web. When you hear a complaint, do something about it. Bring a solution to the table and showcase your problem solving skills. In many cases, the most loyal customers are ones that have had a bad experience that was promptly resolve

2. Needs
If you’re listening carefully, you could catch wind of a need. A client sharing a “pain” or “gain” is an opportunity for you to rise to the occasion and help. Even if you don’t directly offer a solution, you might be able to refer them to a partner. A true “trusted advisor” sometimes offers advice that doesn’t put a penny in their pocket.

3. Successes
Everyone loves to be recognized when they’ve achieved a goal. A word of “Congratulations!” to a client that has won an award, closed a big deal, or made a difference in the community shows you are listening and take pride seeing your clients succeed.

4.Praise
If a client says something nice about you, thank them! A hand-written thank you note for a glowing comment is going to make them feel appreciated. It might also give you the opportunity to ask for a testimonial for your website or a recommendation on LinkedIn.

5.Tips and Trends
A key component of social media is sharing – finding useful information and passing it along. As you listen you will come across information that might interest your clients. For example, if you listen to #nonprofits on Twitter you will frequently see posts with links to articles showing how non-profits are using technology to fulfill their mission. You could pass those same links along to your non-profit clients through social media, email, or a newsletter.

Be Prepared and Take Action

Listening is just one step in the right direction. Listening can help you understand the industries your customers work with, what your customers are doing, what challenges they face, and where they are succeeding. This is valuable information for both pre-sales and account management.

Listening alone does not make your clients feel special. You have to take action so they know you heard them and care about what they have to say. Those actions can be as simple as an email, as warm as a card via snail mail, or as personal as a phone call. Develop systems and processes to make it easy to listen and respond to what you hear. For example:

• Create a system to set up Google Alerts to listen to top tier clients as soon as you get the engagement agreement
• As part of your project kickoff build in the process of inviting clients to connect to your network on LinkedIn
• Have greeting cards on hand for special occasions and words of thanks
• Have template emails ready to share tips and trends you’ve found on the Web
• Collecting resources for a newsletter? Develop a process to harvest and store articles you find while listening

Social media has made it incredibly easy and inexpensive for people to share with one another, sometimes reaching a bigger audience than they ever could in the past. If you can carefully listen, you’ll be able to think more like your customers and less like a service provider. If you can act on what you hear, you’ll build stronger relationships with your clients and be more likely to deliver exceptional service.

About the author:  Joe Rotella, SPHR, is “relentless in cultivating a good experience for clients and prospects...” (Accounting Technology). With over 20 years of Web application design and development experience, Joe is the CTO of Delphia Consulting and leads their Web Design and Usability Practice. His team is responsible for the design of several accounting firm sites including WeiserMazars (www.weiserllp.com), GBQ (www.gbq.com), and ThomasYork, LLP (www.ty-llp.com) and many government sector sites. He is in demand as a speaker, presenting internationally on, web design, social media, usability, and marketing. When he’s not busy riding his new Vespa scooter or geocaching, he’s updating his Facebook page. You can follow him on Twitter (@joerotella) or join his network on LinkedIn (www.linkedin.com/in/joerotella).