Accounting portals and the resulting client experience are more important than ever. Over the past two years, your clients likely spent more time in your portals than face-to-face with your firm’s employees. This behavior is not just due to the shift that occurred during the initial years of COVID, but an ongoing change as clients navigated and relied upon secure portals for their banking, credit card, and healthcare interactions.
You can now expect that when clients interact with your firm, they will spend a reasonable amount of time in your portal. You want to ensure this process is easy for your clients and have them feel supported as they work through their deliverables. This type of strategic change management to a connected platform is necessary to create a positive experience that enhances your relationship with your clients.
A basic portal won't get your firm the results you want. You need a solution that provides exceptional client experience features coupled with familiar ease. With 20+ years of accounting experience, Avii identifies the top 5 features that will make your firm's client experience stand out from the rest.
1) Establish a Single Workspace + Portal for All Exchanges
Your clients do not want to log into multiple apps and portals to provide your firm with the documents you need. They want one point of contact – a single portal experience – unifying all their interactions into a secure workspace. A unified solution replaces the need for clients and staff to use and search among a dozen software solutions, email, and other communications tools.
Clients expect a portal with an easy-to-use interface, customization options, and your firm's branding. You want a virtual hub to complement the high-touch experience you already provide.
Clients love the simplicity and ease of going to the Avii Client Workspace + Portal for all interactions, exchanges, updates, dashboards, and communications with their accounting firm. Your clients set their delivery and notification preferences, which include options for email and text reminders to take them directly into the specific element requiring their attention and effort.
2) Increase Security and Efficiency
Over the past few years, and especially as a result of the change management requirements brought on by COVID, your clients learned to trust the secure portals they leverage for their financial and healthcare exchanges. We should treat the exchange of personal and company information related to accounting the same way.
Keeping all interactions in a unified, secure portal, like Avii Workspace, protects your clients' sensitive data by reducing or eliminating non-secure interactions. One secure portal also reduces the number of systems your clients and employees need to bounce between to get their work done. If your firm has exceptions, your staff can easily add content to the portal on behalf of those clients you allow to drop off physical copies or send documents via email.
3) Choose A Portal Solution that Offers Flexibility and Freedom
You want a solution that works with your practice management needs, not one that makes your firm feel limited or trapped. Avii prides itself on being among the industry’s most open, extensible accounting software platforms, allowing you to interconnect more of your processes, workflows, communications systems, and data. Leverage Avii’s workspace and portal as your sole client experience solution or use Avii in combination with your non-Avii accounting software systems with open exchange capabilities/policies, at no additional charge from Avii.
As an example, Avii Document Management provides firms with several flexible options. If you already use a solution like SharePoint® or Box®, you can connect directly to your files through Avii. The process behind the curtain is seamless for your clients and staff as they work in the Avii Workspace. Suppose you prefer downloading documents manually and uploading them into products like TR Engagement CS; that works on our platform too. Smaller firms even have the option to utilize Avii's native storage on the Microsoft Azure platform. Again, it’s about what works best for you.
There is also great strength in having a portal that unifies all client interactions across all service lines - no more siloed interactions between your tax, audit, advisory, and other teams. A unified portal experience provides clients with one place to stay up-to-date and understand what they need to do next, ultimately enhancing their overall experience with your firm.
4) Increase Employee Satisfaction
A client portal does not just affect clients but is also a massive benefit to your employees. In Avii Workspace, your clients and staff productively communicate and progress through automations across tax, audit, advisory, and other engagements. Everything related to their projects is in one place, neatly organized, and easily accessible. Document collection and project management are easier and more efficient, limiting time spent chasing down files, notes, or conversations. When information is easily accessible, satisfaction will rise among your employees.
5) Consider the Importance of Client Communication and Transparency
In the spirit of keeping all your interactions in one place, clients and employees also appreciate an easy and organized way to communicate with each other. In Avii, discussions between employees and clients are contextual to project elements and are accessible based on client and employee roles and security permissions. These contextual discussions replace many uses of email, texts, and discussion platforms (like MS Teams). Instead of residing in someone’s inbox or needing to be searched across multiple discussion threads, Avii discussions are visible when someone is addressing a document, task, or project. These can also roll forward with projects to serve as a historical reference in future periods or bring new team members up to speed.
It's also essential for clients to know where they are in your accounting firm’s process. Avii Workspace has live dashboards that automatically update as clients and team members complete tasks. With this heightened level of automated visibility and transparency, clients and team members actively participate and drive up satisfaction.
Clients can also decide how they want to receive notifications and updates, such as new discussions or progressions in their workflow. Avii Workspace guides you in establishing templates and default settings for both clients and staff. It gives all users simple-to-comprehensive flexibility in adjusting the types of notifications they receive (on-screen dashboards, emails, and/or texts) for various types of information and activities within the system.
Automating and personalizing each client's dashboards, newsfeeds, and alerts keeps clients informed and engaged. These informational insights enable higher client engagement, shorten response times, replace the need for email updates and reports, and ultimately produce happier clients and team members.
The Avii Difference
Avii Workspace is a best-in-class client portal, but it's even more. It's a complete workspace where your clients and employees can effectively collaborate. In addition to the Client Workspace + Portal, we offer an even more robust Employee Workspace + Portal, Document Exchange & Management, and Dynamic Automations. (Learn more here). Avii is the most automated workspace + portal for accountants and their clients.
Avii is the first Saas HubTM for accounting firms, bringing a fresh approach to accounting software. It was designed from the ground up as neutral, and we built all our automation tools natively.
Avii's technology and business models give you extensive freedom to manage change in broad strokes or granular steps. We designed our "Land and Expand" freedoms to help you show the value of Avii Workspace. Regardless of your size, processes, and goals, you can select the entire suite or only the solutions you need today. Start with one of your teams using one of our tools, and the immediate results will help you accelerate change management across your firm.
Our easy-to-implement Client Workspace + Portal is a great place to start. Schedule a call today so we can help you uplift your firm's experience. We are also available for in-person conversations during the Boomer Summit from August 14th through 17th. You can learn more about our solutions at avii.com.