Client On-Boarding Optimisation

Let's be honest, Excel can be a fantastic business tool. It's so easy to open up a new spreadsheet, throw in a few formulae, and hey presto you've got yourself a great  new business tool!

Unfortunately, Excel often creates as many problems as it does solutions. For example, how many times have you see a formula that's not been copied all the way to the bottom of a table as people have added more rows? Or a column has a defined date format set yet instead someone's written the month by name?

And those formulae that you've created - well, you probably know how quickly they can become unwieldy. It's easy to forget how your formulae work, or even what data they're referencing. And once you start interlinking with other spreadsheets, you're on a road to nowhere fast!

Often, the very person who created the spreadsheet - the person that your critical business process is reliant upon - has left the firm altogether.

Your on-boarding process is likely to have multiple steps that need to be accomplished. And some of those steps will be mandatory, like identity verification. You might be very structured, having your processes neatly documented in a process flow diagram. But what happens when you have multiple clients going through the on-boarding process at the same time, as inevitably happens?

This is where things can come unstuck. When new clients respond at different times, interrupting your process flow.  Not only that, but they provide the wrong data. Or they put it in the wrong fields. Or they don't provide anything at all!

If your follow-up process requires progress to be reviewed in, let's say, an alphabetical order, it can take a long time to work through updating records. With frequent interruption of the person working through this process, it becomes a real nightmare to keep on top of. And, alphabetical order is seldom in line with business or client priorities!

After all the trouble you may have gone to in documenting your process, it's not uncommon to find it just isn't being followed by everyone in the same way.

You know how this goes - your top fee earner, Jane, tends to capture key data when out meeting her clients, but then always fails to transfer the data from her laptop to the network. Or Steve, in Accounts, who always enters data into the billing system first, yet the process clearly states data must go into the practice management system first. Or Reshma, a fee earner's PA, who always misses out the same key data field! 

The more manual steps in your process, the more chances for errors to occur. 

The quicker you can get clients on-boarded, the better. But you can't be slapdash about it. This is critical client data and it must be accurate. Imagine, then, just how difficult this is when your systems don't talk to each other! For example, your CRM isn't integrated with your practice management system, and your practice management system isn't integrated with your billing system. 

How is this problem tackled?

Usually by requiring people to manually rekey data into multiple systems. Not only is this tedious but it's hugely error-prone. And, if your systems aren't integrated, such errors don't usually get automatically flagged. They only become apparent when a problem occurs down the line, such as getting invoices out on time and to the right email addresses. 

It's not just internally where inefficient on-boarding is causing you problems. The client experience is often woeful.

For example, you expect your clients to fill out a form in Word that is emailed to them as an attachment. The document never seems to render the same on different computers or different versions of Microsoft Office.

Then there are those clients who choose to print it out, fill the form out in their own illegible handwriting, then return a wonky scanned copy for you to decipher. Forget trying to use OCR software - you've got no chance!

Perhaps you're a little more advanced and you direct clients to complete online forms. This sounds like a great improvement, until you realise that you're getting your clients to repeatedly provide the same information since you need it to be entered into multiple places and systems. An infuriating process for clients given how little time and patience people have in their lives in today's world. What normally happens when you infuriate your clients is that they just give up, leaving you with incomplete information that you've then got to go and chase, thereby annoying the client further still!