Build client loyalty: Improve visibility into your workflow, billing practices
Updated: October 12, 2005
Professional services firms today face growing pressure to distinguish themselves from the competition by offering the most superior client services. While vitally important, providing these expert services must also now be blended with a level of attention to client care that is new for some firms.
Microsoft believes in helping professional services firms give clients greater visibility into their workflow and billing practices. While it might cause some anxiety at first, Microsoft sees giving clients the right level of visibility into firm operations as a valuable tool in every firm's battle to attract and retain clients.
Virtual client workspaces can help
Using Microsoft technology, professional services firms can create their own virtual client workspaces. In this virtual workspace, firm partners and employees can come together with the client to map out work schedules, review documents, and deploy the resources needed to help the client with their legal, accounting, or consulting needs. This workspace can also become a portal where the client can review the status of specific projects. Clients can collect running tallies of billable hours accrued and compare that to delivery commitments.
The goal is to help the client gain a better understanding of progress on their project while providing the capability to better manage invoices and payables. In this way, the client no longer has to collect information through telephone calls or e-mail exchanges. The information is right in the workspace, updated constantly and available for review at the client's convenience.
Such systems can be developed with role-based designs that a client or a firm helps define. The general counsel at a corporation, for example, might want to use a dashboard that provides an at-a-glance review of the dozen or more projects an outside law firm might be handling. At the same corporation, a staff attorney might be guided only to information that is relevant for a particular case.
Benefits include repeat business and lower costs
By giving clients the right level of visibility into a professional services firm's operations, firms stand to gain multiple benefits:
| • | They can reduce the cost of acquiring incremental revenue by delivering strong service satisfaction to existing clients. In this way, firms can capture repeat business and word-of-mouth referrals. |
| • | They can better differentiate themselves in the marketplace, using their customer service as a selling point in presentations. |
| • | They can reduce the cost of client services by automating systems. |
Running a professional services firm today requires new approaches to client care. Microsoft wants to help firms provide their clients with the most distinctive level of client service available.
