Accounting
Cultivate a positive client experience with these strategies
A poor client experience is the reason why
For a moment, think about your favorite restaurant. If you frequent the location often, the waitstaff may know your name, your favorite dish and where you like to sit. All of these elements create an experience, which, when the food is excellent, keeps you coming back time and time again.
You likely even recommend the restaurant to other people you know, driving more business to the eatery.
The same idea applies to accounting firms.
Client experience is something every accounting firm must work on. Why? An experience that clients enjoy leads to:
- Brand loyalty;
- Deeper client relationships; and,
- Increase in referrals and revenue;
Your clients have options, and the experience you offer can make and keep you the clear choice. I’m going to show you how to create the ultimate client experience for your firm using a simple, step-by-step approach.
First map out your client journey
Every client your firm has will have a journey that they go through. If you don’t know what your clients are experiencing, you can’t focus on improving it. You might even be so busy managing your firm that there’s been a cultural shift that you overlook.
What can you do to map out the journey?
Sit down and ask:
- Why do clients need your services?
- Why was your firm chosen over others?
- Where are clients finding your services?
Once you have these key pieces of information, you need to understand the client’s experience from onboarding to your service delivery. If you don’t have answers to these questions, send surveys to your clients and work with your team to gain these insights.
Next, it’s time to review your tech stack, which many firms need to do to stay relevant.
Review your tech stack
If your technology is outdated or causes any level of friction, it will impact the client experience. Let’s say your firm offers online communication and a portal to upload documents. If you end up asking the client to print and sign a contract, it will look like you’re a bit dated.
Why print, scan and send documents when you can send contracts with e-signatures?
Clients want convenience.
You need to look at what technology they’re interacting with in your marketing efforts, when signing on as a client, while they’re utilizing your services, and even when they are offboarded. Your team also needs to use the right tech stack to boost productivity and efficiency, which leads to better client experience.
Ideally, you’ll review your tech stack annually because behaviors change, and expectations evolve, often growing higher.
For example, consider the client experience around tax organizers. Firms often struggle during tax season because clients do not complete tax organizers. Your team will spend excessive time contacting the client and filling in the “blanks” in the information the client sends over.
Low completion rates are often due to tax organizers being clunky, frustrating and time-consuming, and requiring clients to print documents
With the technology available today, your tax organizers shouldn’t ask clients to print and bring papers to the office. Integrating the right tech stack and software can streamline the entire experience and increase completion rates.
For example,
Even form reminders are sent automatically, alleviating many of the mundane tasks that accountants waste time on.
Your tech stack needs to simplify processes, reduce errors and hold clients accountable when working with your firm, all of which contribute to a better overall client experience.
Multiple areas of your tech stack may need to be improved, and once you’ve identified these weak links, you can pivot into client communication.
Communicate, communicate, communicate
Communication is often at the heart of client complaints. Clients can easily become frustrated if they don’t receive a timely response or their accountants don’t take a proactive approach to communication.
Having a clear policy can help create the ultimate client experience. Make sure your clients understand:
- When they can expect a response (one business day, two business days, etc.), even if it’s just to let them know that you need more time.
- How often they will hear from you. Will you touch base every month, week or quarter?
- Which channels you use to communicate. Will you touch base via email, in-person, Zoom calls, phone calls or some other way?
Communicate your policy during onboarding so that clients know what to expect right from the start.
Request and utilize client feedback
To create an amazing client experience, you need to know what’s working, what’s not working and what clients want or need that you’re not delivering on.
The best way to get this information is to implement a feedback loop into your client workflow.
Gathering feedback doesn’t have to be complicated. You can request it at a cadence that works for your firm and your deliverables. It could be monthly or even yearly after you complete their taxes.
The simplest way to request and gather feedback is through email. You may even want to include a
Your feedback request can also include important questions, like:
- How can we be most helpful to your business?
- What’s going well in your business?
- What’s not going so well in your business?
If you want to keep things simple, send a personalized message asking each client about their satisfaction with your services.
Requesting feedback is half the battle, but when you do get it, make sure that you put it to work and start improving your services.
Final thoughts
Creating the ultimate client experience will take time, effort and a solid plan, but it’s worth it. Happy clients stick around and may even send referrals your way. Great experiences can also lead to positive reviews from clients, which can bolster your reputation and help you attract more clients.
Remember,
Captive audience; some disagreement; game of 21; and other highlights of recent tax cases.
Barrington, Illinois: Tax preparer Gary Sandiego has been sentenced to 16 months in prison for preparing and filing false returns for clients.
He owned and operated the tax prep business G. Sandiego and Associates and for 2014 through 2017 prepared and filed false income tax returns for clients. Instead of relying on information provided by the clients, Sandiego either inflated or entirely fabricated expenses to falsely claim residential energy credits and employment-related expense deductions.
Sandiego, who
He was also ordered to serve a year of supervised release and pay $2,910,442 in restitution to the IRS.
Ft. Worth, Texas: A federal district court has entered permanent injunctions against CPA Charles Dombek and The Optimal Financial Group LLC, barring them from promoting any tax plan that involves creating or using sham management companies, deducting personal non-deductible expenses as business expenses or assisting in the creation of “captive” insurance companies.
The injunctions also prohibit Dombek from preparing any federal returns for anyone other than himself and Optimal from preparing certain federal returns reflecting such tax plans. Dombek and Optimal consented to entry of the injunctions.
According to the complaint, Dombek is a licensed CPA and served as Optimal’s manager and president. Allegedly, Dombek and Optimal promoted a scheme throughout the U.S. to illegally reduce clients’ income tax liabilities by using sham management companies to improperly shift income to be taxed at lower tax rates, improperly defer taxable income or improperly claim personal expenses as business deductions. As alleged by the government, Dombek also promoted himself as the “premier dental CPA” in America.
The complaint further alleges that in promoting the schemes, Dombek and Optimal made false statements about the tax benefits of the scheme that they knew or had reason to know were false, then prepared and signed clients’ returns reflecting the sham transactions, expenses and deductions.
The government contended that the total harm to the Treasury could be $10 million or more.
Kansas City, Missouri: Former IRS employee Sandra D. Mondaine, of Grandview, Missouri, has pleaded guilty to preparing returns that illegally claimed more than $200,000 in refunds for clients.
Mondaine previously worked for the IRS as a contact representative before retiring. She admitted that she prepared federal income tax returns for clients that contained false and fraudulent claims; the indictment charged her with helping at least 11 individuals file at least 39 false and fraudulent income tax returns for 2019 through 2021. Mondaine was able to manufacture substantial refunds for her clients that they would not have been entitled to if the returns had been accurately prepared. She charged clients either a fixed dollar amount or a percentage of the refund or both.
The tax loss associated with those false returns is some $237,329, though the parties disagree on the total.
Mondaine must pay restitution to the IRS and consents to a permanent injunction in a separate civil action, under which she will be permanently enjoined from preparing, assisting in, directing or supervising the preparation or filing of federal returns for any person or entity other than herself. She is also subject to up to three years in prison.
Los Angeles: Long-time lawyer Milton C. Grimes has pleaded guilty to evading more than $4 million in federal taxes over 21 years.
Grimes pleaded guilty to one count of tax evasion relating to his 2014 taxes, admitting that he failed to pay $1,690,922 to the IRS. He did not pay federal income taxes for 23 years — 2002 through 2005, 2007, 2009 through 2011, and 2014 through 2023 — a total of $4,071,215 owed to the IRS. Grimes also admitted he did not file a 2013 federal return.
From at least September 2011, the IRS issued more than 30 levies on his personal bank accounts. From at least May 2014 to April 2020, Grimes evaded payment of the outstanding income tax by not depositing income he earned from his clients into those accounts. Instead, he bought some 238 cashier’s checks totaling $16 million to keep the money out of the reach of the IRS, withdrawing cash from his client trust account, his interest on lawyers’ trust accounts and his law firm’s bank account.
Sentencing is Feb. 11. Grimes faces up to five years in federal prison, though prosecutors have agreed to seek no more than 22 months.
Sacramento, California: Residents Dominic Davis and Sharitia Wright have pleaded guilty to conspiracy to file false claims with the IRS.
Between March 2019 and April 2022, they caused at least nine fraudulent income tax returns to be filed with the IRS claiming more than $2 million in refunds. The returns were filed in the names of Davis, Wright and family members and listed wages that the taxpayers had not earned and often listed the taxpayers’ employer as one of the various LLCs created by Davis, Wright and their family members. Many of the returns also falsely claimed charitable contributions.
Davis prepared and filed the false returns; Wright provided him information and contacted the IRS to check on the status of the refunds claimed.
Davis and Wright agreed to pay restitution. Sentencing is Feb. 3, when each faces up to 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine.
St. Louis: Tax attorneys Michael Elliott Kohn and Catherine Elizabeth Chollet and insurance agent David Shane Simmons have been sentenced to prison for conspiring to defraud the U.S. and helping clients file false returns based on their promotion and operation of a fraudulent tax shelter.
Kohn was sentenced to seven years in prison and Chollet to four years. Simmons was sentenced to five years in prison.
From 2011 to November 2022, Kohn and Chollet, both of St. Louis, and Simmons, who is based out of Jefferson, North Carolina, promoted, marketed and sold to clients the Gain Elimination Plan, a fraudulent tax scheme. They designed the plan to conceal clients’ income from the IRS by inflating business expenses through fictitious royalties and management fees. These fictitious fees were paid, on paper, to a limited partnership largely owned by a charity. Kohn and Chollet fabricated the fees.
Kohn and Chollet advised clients that the plan’s limited partnership was required to obtain insurance on the life of the clients to cover the income allocated to the charitable organization. The death benefit was directly tied to the anticipated profitability of the clients’ businesses and how much of the clients’ taxable income was intended to be sheltered.
Simmons earned more than $2.3 million in commissions for selling the insurance policies, splitting the commissions with Kohn and Chollet. Kohn and Chollet received more than $1 million from Simmons.
Simmons also filed false personal returns that underreported his business income and inflated his business expenses, resulting in a tax loss of more than $480,000.
In total, the defendants caused a tax loss to the IRS of more than $22 million.
Each was also ordered to serve three years’ supervised release and to pay $22,515,615 in restitution to the United States.
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