Speaker 1: 0:00

Welcome back everyone. This is Accountants 2.0. I'm Steve Purbidge and with me, as always, ted Williamson. Hello, today, the second last step for new age accountants, step 10, feedback and improvement for you, your clients, from you to your clients. Nice long title and, if you check the blog, a lot of stuff, but we're going to break it down because each of the items as mentioned in the blog can be broken down into a whole discussion on their own. But today we're going to talk about the concept of feedback, how to use it with regard to your clients, employees, and also for discontinuous improvement.

Speaker 1: 0:43

Basically, my view is feedback is critical. Feedback that is acquired through a formal method, so there's actually data unless you can do counts and understand it, not just anecdotal hearsay can really lead to positive change in an organization and reinforce or show gaps in processes. So feedback can take place in many forms. It could be a survey, it could be based on interviews, accumulation of testimonials with maybe a sentiment rating. With the new AI tools, like with Watson, you can do sentiment ratings on testimonials and things like that. But at the same time, it's when it's applied, so it could be applied like after a sale, or when a sale doesn't close, or after a process, like successful onboarding, and then maybe periodically throughout your process, but when it happens is key, ted, do you have any opinion on that?

Speaker 2: 1:37

I think it has to happen all the time. I think every step of your relationship you should get feedback. We kind of talked about this previously For a review? You've sold them. Ask for a review, you've onboarded them. Ask for a review. What's the same idea? It's more or less ask for feedback and, if it's positive, get a review. But also, it's not because you want a review, that's not why you want the feedback.

Speaker 2: 2:05

I think it's vitally important to ask for feedback and for my client, especially at each stage, because when you ask for feedback after a certain stage and they give you like honest feedback, you understand where to fix the relationship going forward for other people or for them.

Speaker 2: 2:21

So you see if something's broken in your processes, you see if you need to make improvements or you have to go back in time and start looking at what other clients might that have happened to so I can make it right. So say, something dramatic happened in there and no previous client had told you, and they just have a sour taste in their mouth. Now you can go back and say, hey, I realized that this happened with a client and it seems to be something that we fixed, but you might've experienced this and so we want to have a discussion on that, improve the relationship and get that taste out of their mouth. That's important. And so, like I said at every stage, so if you've sold them and they don't like the way you did your sales process they think you're greasy or whatever you know that you had to fix your presentation. Then you onboarded them and they didn't like the. They thought it was really clunky and they had to do way too much work. Now you know you have an idea of what to improve, right?

Speaker 1: 3:22

Okay, so you're proposing a business model where feedback's being asked at every step. How do you do that without the person suffering from feedback fatigue? Because I'll tell you this um, I get turned off when there's like a pop-up ask me for feedback whenever I'm on a forum, say on a sas platform. Um, is there a way of doing it? That's subtle, uh, and I, and I guess it would vary from step to step, because if I'm in the inner in an interface and software, yeah, there's gonna have to be something to grab my attention to say, hey, we just complete this. How did we do? Um, is it, is it a combination?

Speaker 2: 3:52

because we're always being asked it gets a little.

Speaker 1: 3:57

You know um imposing the person just wants to work.

Speaker 2: 4:01

Yeah, it really depends. We don't want to be imposing obviously, so it really depends. We don't want to be imposing obviously, so it really depends. Like, if it's, for example, if it is after the sales process and then you're going into onboarding, you generally have a meeting when you do onboarding right. So now in that meeting is when you can get your feedback.

Speaker 1: 4:20

So that's more interviewing, an interview style which is very personal. Yeah, yeah, so that's more an interview style which is very personal, yeah, yeah, interview.

Speaker 2: 4:33

At certain stages it could just be a quick email saying hey, you know, thanks for jumping on board after the onboarding. Here's what you can expect from our relationship and here are your managers that you can reach out to if something happens. Please provide feedback. They might not or they might, but you give them the option and it'll be like a quick form that they can click on and just say or basically, you just have like the five smiley faces you know from sad to smiley you know, rate your experience.

Speaker 2: 5:03

They might just click it and it'll give you an idea if you need to reach out to them or not to find out more information.

Speaker 1: 5:06

Well, yeah, they give one star five. You want to ask why? Yes, and then, middle of the road, you just move on. But that could be a possibility. But, yeah, okay. So you're saying vary it up, have it baked in your process, every step. Maybe you have a capacity for feedback, excuse me, which which is great, but, um, you can, you can shake it up a bit. It could be a personal one-on-one, it could be a form, it may be a pop-up, but again, you're saying rule of thumb is an opportunity for feedback at almost every turn where there's a, where there's a progression in a process or relationship yeah, so so not that you require feedback because you don't want to be pushy on getting it, no, but but that you're required to find to ask for feedback, right.

Speaker 2: 5:50

So, in some in some way, just make it organic. Like, like we said, like you're already in a meeting, ask for feedback. You're already sending an email saying, hey, welcome to the team, ask for feedback. Right, it's organic. The people expect it these days that it's going to be in on on an email or or some sort of communication and make it easy.

Speaker 1: 6:08

Don't force them always to go to the website and hunt for the feedback thing so like, like, even have it at the bottom of every electronic invoice or report like there'll be you got one need to get in touch with us. Click here, and then it takes them to that, that portal.

Speaker 2: 6:21

Absolutely Well. I mean, like you know the a lot of times when you're online and you do like, like, like service or support, you know like from from a SaaS platform or something like that, and then, after they close the ticket, they send you they send you a.

Speaker 2: 6:39

Thing that says how do we do? You know, how was your support right? Even just stuff like that is important. So if they, if they, inquire about something, and you solve the problem for them, even just sending something quick after that like after you've already onboarded them all of that something quick that said, hey, how do we do in that situation that you brought up when you communicate it with us, if we have an issue, were we able to solve it? And if not, then did you solve it yourself? You have to figure out what you're doing right and what you're doing wrong, and I think it's very, very important to make sure that we're doing that Okay.

Speaker 1: 7:10

Well, we'll get to the continuous improvement part of this podcast. We'll get to what you do with all this feedback. No, you're still on clients, but now we're going to move on to employees and we'll talk about what to do with all this feedback later. But employee feedback, in my opinion, is right up there with client feedback. A well-oiled machine needs just like in a car or high-performance sports car you have to have gauges, you have to have ways of knowing whether you're redlining or not, and so regimented forms and consistent forms of feedback for employees within an organization is important as well, in your opinion.

Speaker 1: 7:50

What would you like better Feedback based on, like a performance review? Get a lot of anonymous surveys or open door policy? That's always my favorite, not, but well, because then you end up just gabbing all day. Yeah, so open door policy, with some caveats, of course. And then, of course, there's like other stuff, like town halls and things. Where do you have them impromptu and do you recommend maybe just having them scheduled so that employees know that? Hey, I'm going to tolerate this up to this point, but I know that on this date, or every Monday, is the day that we have a quick town hall where I can air this and make a policy maybe of you know, don't just start spouting off every issue Like there's a way of dealing it. Do you recommend that approach?

Speaker 2: 8:40

Absolutely. I recommend every type. Like what I did in my previous firm, so we had a town hall once a month. Like what I did in my previous firm, so we had a town hall once a month. We would discuss we tried to make it a little bit more fun, but we would discuss issues and we would talk about what's going right, what's going wrong, what do you feel. And it was a small enough team that we could do that.

Speaker 1: 9:03

Obviously, as you have bigger teams, it's more or less the executive team that would know and then there's a chat going on or question and answer, or you might have departmental stuff, and then each manager takes it to a higher level town hall.

Speaker 2: 9:17

So town halls I actually am a fan of because that it also creates more camaraderie, you know. So people are in it together. They can. They can chat on the side and talk about how much of a pain in the butt Ted is for making us come to these town halls, things like that, and my team would do that. They would tell me well, we had this little side chat.

Speaker 1: 9:37

When they start sharing links like tedisanissuecom and stuff like that.

Speaker 2: 9:42

Yeah, then it becomes an issue.

Speaker 1: 9:43

You start seeing it in the chat window on the online.

Speaker 2: 9:45

Yeah, so we had town halls. We had regular meetings as well, like you know, weekly or or weekly meetings, you know, every other day kind of thing, or daily meetings, and in those you should you should be asking for feedback, and a lot of that is what went, what went right, what, what went right, what went wrong, but not only for clients. Generally those are production meetings, so you talk about your clients, things like that. But you can bring up other things like what's going on in the team. How are you feeling? That kind of stuff you can do that. And again, a lot of times I don't want to talk about that. And that's where you get into the anonymous surveys and things like that, which are great, but again, you have to have a bigger team. So I tried doing anonymous surveys and we only had, I think, 11 or 12 people at the time and nobody wanted to do it because they're like you're going to know if I bring it up, that it's me. Yeah, because you understand all the issues going on with the company.

Speaker 1: 10:46

Especially if it's a role-based comment. It's like, yeah, it's a role-based, role-based comment. It's like, um, yeah, it's an ap problem.

Speaker 2: 10:50

Uh yeah, there's only one person in ap yeah, like, or at the time there was one marketing person. So they're like oh, you know, the marketing department is really, you know, slacking and sales or whatever it's like. Well, now we know that they're just calling out that one person, right? So, yeah, but there's that. I'm.

Speaker 2: 11:05

I'm a big fan of open door policy. I, I think, creating that culture where people feel comfortable enough. So I did that with our staff and our clients so that they felt comfortable enough. Now I had to come back a little bit on the clients, because then they felt like they would only come to me and not my team, so I had to reduce that a little bit. But with staff especially, it's important for them to feel like they can come to you, um, and and that you'll be there and you'll listen, and so I think that, like you said, the open door, but but not necessarily open door, where it should just come on in, it's more or less just send me a chat and we'll just we'll discuss whether or not we should talk about this, or you should have hr talking about this, or whatever, right?

Speaker 1: 11:46

My life in logistics we actually physically had the door in our offices because we're a traditional office and we would then have, like we would say if it's closed, don't knock. But then we had to be disciplined, like when it's open we opened it. For as a manager you would actually have it open, say, from 10 am to noon, because you try to make your meetings more operational, so then people can walk in. But then if you have meetings with clients and stuff, it's closed. And why I'm even mentioning that is did you have that kind of communication saying, or is it just known? Now, a lot of your stuff was remote. It would be easier remotely.

Speaker 2: 12:21

Huh, it's a little bit easier remotely because, you can just send a message at any time, right, and then I'll get to it when I get to it. Now, grant, you should get to it quickly, because you need them to feel like they're heard.

Speaker 2: 12:34

That the door is open and that you actually care If you wait 24 to 48 hours before you respond to their issue, then it's going to make them actually feel worse. Yeah, but if you I mean Grant, if you're on vacation or something, they'll understand, but if you're, but if you're, if they're coming to you and you're just ignoring them, they'll know that you're ignoring them and they'll feel like, like your door isn't open and you don't care. And why are they even bothering, right?

Speaker 1: 13:02

well, one of the nice features our online environment has we use google platform is it actually shows that you're in meetings or you're occupied. So when someone sends a text on the internal channel, you're not going to respond right away because it just says that you're in a meeting or something like that. That's a great feature. Those features didn't really exist in the early parts of platforms.

Speaker 1: 13:20

And that being said, the feedback mechanisms on that open door policy, the way of communicating within an office, should be standardized. If you're using personal text Facebook Messenger, whatsapp and the internal texting that's not awesome and you might yeah for that kind of thing to work back for proper feedback, say look, internal communication should just take place on this platform, everything else that's your stuff.

Speaker 2: 13:46

Yeah. So for example, like now we use Google, Like you know, Steve, we use Google for all of our internal stuff. We use A20 Connect for all of our client communications and communications about clients. We don't have practice management software anymore because we don't really need it in this business.

Speaker 2: 14:03

Our clients use it, not us. Yes, so, like in the last firm we had, we used Financial Sense and that was all about clients and stuff about the work being done, but it wasn't a CRM, so you still had to, you know, uh, nurture people into being a client. And a crm is great too, because then you can still communicate um with current clients, but more strategically rather than um but but within your practice management software you can do all those communications. And then we used workplace as our communication and that's where the open door thing was. So workplaces. I met on facebook and that was like the, the business version of facebook.

Speaker 2: 14:43

It had a client like knowledge library and everything that's where all the chats would happen and we were right where we would have our meetings and we would, they would and employees would come to us through there and we'd have group group um conversations and stuff too. So it was really it was great that way. It was like an internal, and so I think that really helped with the culture and with getting feedback and having people work together.

Speaker 1: 15:09

Yeah, so that consistency and, to be honest, with CRMs, prospects can try to communicate with us any way they can and that's one of the good things about our platform is it can handle any communication channel. But yeah, internally with employees, there should be some consistency so that you can have a virtual open-door policy and be consistent and it's just easier to manage and also, just then there's a record, a consistent central record of that communication, just in case it turns into an HR issue or something that really seriously needs to be acted upon you'll have that.

Speaker 1: 15:41

So we're hitting all this feedback, all right Feedback. We have feedback from clients, feedback from employees, so the best practice of managing that feedback is where we are. So you mentioned right off the bat timely, timely feedback. Even if you can't address it, some form of acknowledgement Got the message. You know give me a day, or you know manage the expectation. But don't just not react. Give me a day or manage the expectation but don't just not react.

Speaker 2: 16:05

Let me look into this.

Speaker 1: 16:08

Unless you're going to get back with the answer right away. Don't make the answer the first piece of feedback as your timely feedback, unless it really literally is instantly responding. So then that's great. But if you can't instantly respond, at least give them a knowledge right. And then, when you're constantly having that, so it's a continuous improvement culture. I see that.

Speaker 1: 16:29

That's why I listed in the blog you have to have mechanisms in place to process this and it has to be consistent. You can't just, oh, that's great, and then act on an idea and then another one oh, that was kind of tricky and then just kind of backburner. It's like why is one easy and why is one not? People need to know it equals clients and they have to understand the weight of each request. Like if one request would require an absolute change in a software platform, well, that's major. Okay, may not be able to get to it, but definitely will weigh it when we're making that consideration. But the other one is oh, it's just a quick record update, because we always get the spelling of your name wrong on the bill, but on the emails it's correct. Well, okay, we'll do that.

Speaker 2: 17:13

That'll be done right away.

Speaker 1: 17:14

And then prove it right. So that leads to the more complex one action plans, to the more complex one action plans. So when you do a response, as long as it's not revealing any proprietary stuff, give people an idea of what's going to happen. Right, like what's coming next. So acknowledge it. We do see a solution.

Speaker 1: 17:33

The action plan might be further feedback, like is our action plan satisfactory? Are you satisfied with the way we're acknowledging and I'm going to remedy this thing or not remedy it, based on our reasons? And then that's one way. The other way is, I guess, if it can't be done in one step, right, like it's also the scope of what it is, if it's complex, an action plan should come in. If it's just something that's a tweak, well then the action plan is we're going to do it and it's going to be done in three days. And if it's not done in three days, you know we'll. Well, if our processes are being controlled, there'll be a reason coming to you first why it's not done in three days, not you waiting for you to say, hey, it's not done. So that kind of thing Does that make sense.

Speaker 2: 18:22

It makes all the sense. Yeah, absolutely. I think communication at every step when you're dealing with people is important. It doesn't matter what person they are it can be a staff, they can be a client. You have to communicate and you have to set expectations and meet them and let people know where you're at, because otherwise they're just going to think whatever it is that they think, and it's usually not good if they're left to their own devices. Right, it's just human nature.

Speaker 1: 18:50

I just got an idea and I don't know if this is out there in any product, but I was applying. Actually it's local authorities, I do work for a charity and it's the vulnerable sector check so you can work with people with disabilities and stuff. When I made the application to the municipality for that, they sent back an email and the email had a graphic saying where the application was in the process. So not only was the graphic acknowledging it, it a little like highlight, so in each response you knew how far it was in the process. I thought that would be. That's cool for people who have a little more complex things to manage. Or it's an established process that there is a tight timeline but every communication just shows how far along you are and that way the person just subconsciously knows oh, I'm three quarters away there. I thought that was a cool thing, especially for a city government to do, because I mean, we come from the generation Ted where cities weren't known to get back to you. So I thought that was like a huge order of magnitude improvement.

Speaker 2: 19:56

Well, they're getting better. They're getting better. I think governments are also paying attention to this too right, because we're getting better. I think governments are also paying attention to this too right. They're all elected.

Speaker 1: 20:05

It creates less drain on resources. If you're not giving that feedback, what's going to happen? They're going to call.

Speaker 2: 20:09

They're going to email and they're going to take up more of your resources and communication.

Speaker 1: 20:14

Head it off at the pass. Tell them where they're at, then they have no reason. Some people may not look at it and call you anyways, but a majority of them would imagine uh, especially in our industry, people tend to be a little more rational.

Speaker 2: 20:29

Uh, they will. Yeah, that's um another thing. So, like there's um this one firm that that I know I keep getting, you know um messages and and or people keep telling me about this, this firm and they're that they just never get back to them. They never, they said they, they they're on it, and then it's months later they have no idea what's happening, and so now they have a very bad taste in their mouth and it's like, if you, if, if and I've tried to talk to this firm like, like you just need to respond and you just need to, you know, like keep them in touch, and't and they don't, and therefore the sentiment gets worse and worse and worse. And you know, referrals stop things like that, right? So it's important, like there's an example of not giving feedback, not using, you know, not caring, I guess, necessarily about what it is that people are saying or expecting, or thinking. Really you need to, because it's going to hurt that firm in the end, right?

Speaker 1: 21:26

Well, it's one of the levels of excellence that we add with our service. I mean, we will help a firm with that feedback. So two things are going to happen. If you're the type of firm that doesn't get back to people but you know it's a problem, we can help you with that, or we're going to help your competition with it, because you're not going to get any calls.

Speaker 2: 21:41

Yes, Because all of your competition is going to be. Their clients are going to be super happy because they work with accountants too Well there you go, absolutely A little bit of self-promotion.

Speaker 1: 21:53

Of course we're self-promotion we have to sometimes. Well, it's just that our business model touches some of the most important aspects of relationships, ie sales and revenue acquisition.

Speaker 2: 22:03

so we're gonna have to mention well, business is relationships, all businesses, relationships. And if you're not, if you're not having that as your focus of your, of your, of your business and your growth, then you're doing a disservice to yourself because other one other companies will, and and guess what they're? They're gonna grow or leave you in the dust. You might still do, okay, because people just expect that in the industry, or if you, you know, become a level above everybody else in the industry in their business acumen. You can be a level above everybody else in the industry, right?

Speaker 1: 22:36

so, um, that probably came to relationship building.

Speaker 2: 22:40

that's what I mean. That that's how it happens. You have to build relationships in order for things to happen for you, and you need to be respectful of other people, and if you're not, it's not going to end well.

Speaker 1: 22:53

Wow, that's a pretty powerful closing comment. Is that your closing comment for this episode?

Speaker 2: 22:57

Sure, I'm not going to step on your toes this time, I'm going to shut up.

Speaker 1: 23:01

All right, let Sure I'm not going to step on your toes this time. I'm going to shut up. All right, let's do it close, because we're going to get into step 11, the last step that's coming up in our journey to be a new age accountant about sustainability and social responsibility, and we're looking forward to interacting and talking to everyone. Like, comment, follow us, subscribe whether you're hearing this on YouTube, on a podcast platform, or seeing it in our group, in our Facebook group, just interact with us. We love to provide feedback and get to know who our audience is, and we love getting feedback, so give us some.

Speaker 1: 23:41

There you go. That's right. That's right. So I'm Steve Purpich with Ted Williamson, and this is Accountants 2.0. Have a great day. Have a great day, bye.