Contents
Trust is the most crucial factor of any relationship, whether it is related to personal or professionals. Nowadays, as we can see, the world is facing the problem due to the COVID-19 crisis, businesses are impacted, and their relationship with customers is also on stake.
Customer loyalty and trust are being put on test. Accountants, CPAs, and tax professionals are also facing the problems of maintaining and building their relationships with clients. This pandemic has forced accountants to stay at home, but not to stop the filing accounting, by merely putting their accounting software such as QuickBooks Enterprise on the cloud. This process will help them to continue their accounting operations and accomplish all their tasks on time.
To continue your accounting firm, building and maintaining customer trust is essentials. In today’s digital era, there are several ways to engage with customers and stay connected with them. The accountant should communicate with care and makes the customers feel valued and secure also to reach out for any assistant.
Here are some ways accountants can consider to help in maintaining a robust and sustainable relationship with their customers during COVID-19 pandemic.
1. Keep the business website active
As everyone is using the internet to get the update regarding their work, so keep your business website active all the time. It will help your customer to reach you, and if you want to share any update with your clients, you can share via your website.
A website is always the first thing for a customer to reach for any queries or to gather the information. Making your website creative and interactive will help you to know more about your customer’s concerns, problems they are facing, so you will get a better chance to know more in-depth about your customers to serve them better.
Creative, attractive banners on your home page, deliver the important messages to your clients about your current situation of processes, and many more things you can say via the website to your customers. This will help your customers to know more about you and accountants’ efforts to help their clients in the best possible way.
2. Keep customers informed via emails
Email is the best way for the accountants to update their clients about their work status and also to stay in touch with them. It is the most professional way for any business to deliver their messages. In this pandemic situation, accountants should stay transparent about their activities going on.
If the communication is done correctly, the clients can also empathize with their accounts. With the help of email communication, you can update your customers about the delay or next steps during this COVID-19. You can also share the personalized email to clients to update about any specific situation about the accounting processes.
3. Regroup and review
In this pandemic situation, the accountants can review all the customer’s details in depth and regrow with them. The review process will help to identify and improve their operations. It will help them to prioritize their long and short term process, whether it is related to the best product, service, and relationship criteria with their clients.
The new lessons can be learned during this COVID-19 that will also help to tackle future challenges in a much better way. It helps the accountants to make their team more reliable, and customers will be more committed to continuing their businesses with you. The loyalty of customers towards your company will make you always ahead in any competition era.
4. Engaging through Social Media
Social Media has become very active during this pandemic time; people are frequently using their social media accounts and spends a lot of time. It will be very beneficial for the accountants to be active and promote their businesses on social platforms.
Accountants can share their views, their ideas to their customers and can reach to know better the current customer base, what they are up to, and how accountants can help them. To serve better, direct communication is the best way to deal with your customer’s real-time conversation on social media, will trust the loyalty, and reassure the customer that someone is available for them for any help regarding the accounting.
You can launch the innovative campaigns to interact with your customers, such as scheduling live video chat sessions for their queries, where customers can directly ask their problems and get the best quick solutions.
5. Make your process transparent
A transparent process is a way to build the trust of customers. It accurately tells your customers about your way of working and, more importantly, how you serve your customer.
Well, this world is full of uncertainty, as an accounting professional, sharing what’s best and NOT best with customers is imperative with building trust. But telling customers about your brand where it stands and what challenges your accounting teams are facing is respected. Nowadays, customers also appreciate the transparent request, understand the situation, and react in apatient and a better way—a very thoughtful and great idea to build your community.
Transparency also strengthens the consistency of customers and makes the best to deliver the promise to the clients.
You can leverage cloud technology to get real-time access to the workflow and keep clients updated at every step that helps build trust.
6. Always Follow up
Follow up process will make the customer feel that you are concerned about their problem and want to sort the issue they are facing. Follow up after the initial call is essential to build trust, as it shows an expression of your concern.
It allows you to stay abreast of critical changes of your clients, and it also helps the businesses to build trust. Make your every conversation by determining the next steps and scheduling the next call until the issue is not sorted.
Conclusion
Well, it’s not easy to run any business in this pandemic time, but still, focusing on customers can help to show your customers that you care for them, and their problems matter to you a lot.
Using the right technology and keeping interaction with clients, it will help the accountants to achieve greater versatility and efficiency. Once you gain your customer’s trust, they will continue with you for a very long time, even after the COVID-19 virus pandemic leaves us.