Fuelling the Modern Accounting Practice with Automation:
Part 7: How Firms Use Bots & AI to Boost Client Service
Bots and AI for accounting isn’t just about internal efficiency, it’s about delivering an unparalleled experience for your clients. In today’s fast-paced world, clients want real-time insights, proactive service, and smooth, hassle-free communication, all for the lowest possible price. With Bots and AI, you can provide all that and more.
How Bots & AI Can Improves Client Experience
1. Faster Response Times
Bots can handle repetitive client queries, send reminders, and answer frequently asked questions. This allows you to provide faster responses without consuming human resources. For example, if clients frequently asks about VAT or tax payment dates and amounts, you can provide an automated response that provides an update based on the clients real-time data. Meaning less work for you.
In Practice: Set up automated reminders for due dates, upcoming meetings, and other key events and deadlines. This ensures clients stay informed, even without a direct email or phone call.
2. Real-Time Data Sharing
Clients love staying informed, but they don’t always have time for detailed reports. Bots and AI can help you provide real-time insights. Generating instant updates on their financial standing, so clients are never in the dark about their finances.
In Practice: Automated dashboards and reporting Bots can display current financial data, cash flow trends, and other critical metrics. They keep clients engaged and informed with minimal effort on your part.
3. Improved Consistency and Accuracy
Errors in financial reports or communications can damage trust. Bots and AI can reduce the risk of mistakes by handling repetitive tasks accurately and consistently, ensuring that clients receive high-quality, reliable information.
In Practice: Automated workflows can ensure that all clients receive the same high standard of service. Standardised reports and communications reduce the risk of inconsistency.
4. Personalised Service at Scale
Bots and AI enables you to offer a truly personalised touch without having to manually manage every detail. With the right integrations to other key systems, you can automatically deliver according to client preferences with personalised messages and manage follow-ups, without sacrificing time and effort.
In Practice: Use Bots and AI to manage and track client interactions, making it easier to provide tailored services. For instance, set up alerts for client milestones, like business anniversaries or tax deadlines, so you can reach out with timely advice or congratulations.
5. Proactive Insights and Recommendations
Clients want proactive advice, not just after-the-fact reporting. With AI-powered Bots, you can provide predictive insights based on client data, helping them make informed decisions before issues arise.
In Practice: Automated analysis tools can identify patterns and suggest actions. For example; potential cash flow issues, seasonal revenue dips, or expense optimisation opportunities.
Bots and AI as a Client Service Superpower
When used thoughtfully, Bots and AI will allow you to give clients the experience they crave and that could set you apart. Proactive, reliable, and tailored to their needs. It’s not about taking the “human” out of accounting, it’s about freeing up your time so you can provide better, more focused service.
I’ll finish this article with my no-holds barred recommendations for using Bots and AI in your accounting practice. Starting with Bots. These are your work-horses, and should be grinding away 24-hours a day (albeit digitally with no stress or frustration, unlike us) to enter and update transactional data, create reports, post adjustments, and generally enable real-time accounts for you and your clients. These accounting Bots are bullet-proof and work on well defined, pre-determined activities, or about 80%+ of your average practice bread and butter. Using these Bots will reveal how good your data is and teach you exactly where and what can be improved.
The real opportunity for every practice however, is to step beyond just finding things to give a Bot to work on. Instead re-think how your practice could operate, with a Bots-First mindset – and that’s where true transformation happens.
Aided with AI
And finally, AI – a term so generic it’s meaningless to be honest. But as a technology, I believe it’s fundamentally undervalued and underused, in nearly every industry (so far). I believe accountants will be able to extract the most value from AI by training it on their own practice data, versus generic publicly trained data on the internet. For some firms, this could amount to masses of data over several decades and thousands of clients. But even a relatively new practice with only 50 clients over 3 years and several industries, with financial reports and analysis – that’s still one very powerful proposition.
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