With tax season just weeks away, your firm has likely already sent out its tax organizers and the yearly letter imploring clients to get their paperwork in early. Tax season is a time when a firm’s relationship with its clients can be tested — for firms, late paperwork, uncooperative or unresponsive clients, and handholding can mean real trouble. For clients, inadequate or incomplete explanations, unwelcome surprises, and feeling pressured and/or rushed can put them off your services.
When you have a zillion and six returns to complete, it’s understandable that you might resist spending any additional minutes thinking about how you interact with your clients, but this point is crucial: as stressed as you are, tax time can be stressful for many of your clients as well. Especially if they’re expecting bad news. So it’s worth taking even 5 extra minutes to consider their state of mind, what you need to communicate to them and how that information might be best received.
At the end of this blog is a quick checklist of questions you can use to help you assess your client’s state of mind and better communicate with them.
Client interaction doesn’t have to be complicated, but it does take active participation on your part. If you have it in your head just to get through the returns and call it a day, you aren’t really providing a complete service. Worse, you’re not differentiating your firm through a demonstration of care and concern.
You should also take the time to ask your clients about their businesses, not just their taxes.
With that in mind, here’s a short checklist of questions you can ask your tax clients to better communicate on both their taxes and their businesses, and make them feel heard:
And of course, you can always craft even more questions or customize these to fit specific clients as statements rather that questions: “John, I remember last year I accidentally spilled a piping hot mug of coffee on your head as we were going over your return — I want you to know I’ve given up coffee, so no worries about that happening this year.”
And remember, getting things done quickly is always a good way to impress. We can help you with that. If you use Botkeeper, you can kick that time-sucking write-up work to the curb with Rapid Write-Up.