Within the professional services industry, there is a greater need than ever to find innovative solutions to products, services, and processes. While on your path to grow your business and become more efficient, a truly innovative solution can have a much greater impact than that. Innovative solutions will have a tangible impact on your business by helping you keep up with emerging trends and adapting to your clients’ changing needs, while covering the inherent challenges and uncertainties that come with new tech implementation.
A document management software (DMS) can address the issues as the ultimate innovative solution for one of the most significant parts of your business—the constant and rapid increase of document work.
The Impact of Cloud-Based Document Management For Professional Services
Innovation is what can transform time spent on tedious document work into an opportunity for growth.
On a daily basis, the average financial services firm handles dozens of document types. Receiving, sending, routing, storing, reviewing, and deleting these documents can be a significant drain on resources when relying on manual and inefficient storage solutions. While most firms have attempted to input solutions to solve these document-related issues, most solutions are unspecific to the needs of professional services.
A DMS, with solutions specifically addressing the needs of professional services, is an answer only a handful of businesses have uncovered. When firms identify the need to implement a true out-of-the-box solution, businesses thrive. A DMS will enable you to get ahead of industry-wide changes, while helping your employees spend less time on administrative tasks, and more time directly working with clients.
DMS can manage your documents through improved organization and storage. The right DMS can also automate your time-consuming document processes, such as locating a document, generating reports, and extracting key data. With encryption, secure sharing, and audit trails, a DMS can fully protect sensitive information and ensure strict compliance requirements are met.
Completing document work is nonnegotiable for your business, but the way in which you do so is up to you. The solution can be a traditional way of managing documents involving manual processes, or it can be through the use of a specifically tailored solution like document management.
Leaving your DMS to request documents from your clients, and routing them to the right advisor for review and approval, while filing them into the correct client folder is powerful. This will allow that advisor to focus on strategizing and executing plans that can offer more value to the client, instead of having to chase down documents.
Document management can drive innovation with automation, compliance, and cloud-based storage.
Implement Automation
Within professional services and its processes, it’s likely that your firm or business spends a significant portion of its working hours on manual tasks. Time spent on manual processes that can be automated translates to lost billable hours and decreased efficiency in delivering for your clients. The age-old tug-of-war between the admin work and strategic work can be put to an end with document management. In order to maximize your business's efficiency, automation is key.
Innovating your processes with document management can automate your inefficient document-dependent work plaguing multiple areas across your business.
Onboarding New Clients
The process of onboarding new clients in professional services is arguably one of the most crucial times for the firm-client relationship. As such, the firm is focused on the critical work of gathering relevant documents and records and sometimes overlooks the importance of building the client relationship and beginning on a streamlined, organized, and polished front. Without the tools to make this process seamless, efficient, and repeatable at scale, relationships are quickly lost.
Firms who take full advantage of the full functionality of a DMS are likely to set themselves apart as an organization that puts their customers first.
Some of the ways that document management can help onboarding:
Request documents from new clients
Provide clients with a secure portal to upload documents
Create fillable forms for clients
Automatically route documents to the right storage location
Finalize contracts with eSignature
Automating the constant stream of document work with document management is a key way to evolve your processes to survive in today’s market.
Ongoing Client Management
Firms often overlook the simplest form of client satisfaction—speed to findability and storage. Ongoing client relationships also suffer when firms fail to modernize and adapt their document processes.
A team’s frantic efforts to keep the client satisfied can’t guarantee that the documents are located in a timely and efficient manner when using traditional storage solutions.
Document management, on the other hand, can help firms better manage the excessive amount of client paperwork that it takes to carry out their processes. By automating the day-to-day tasks of your firm, you enable yourselves to provide clients with higher value services involving strategic initiatives, instead of spending time locating and routing documents. Most importantly, freeing up time allows you to expand the capacity of your team to handle a larger portfolio of clients.
Document management can improve ongoing client management through:
Facilitating two-way information sharing
Routing documents for one-touch approvals
Enabling teams to retrieve documents in an instant
Centralizing document storage
Establishing a precedent of efficiency backed by powerful technology will enable your firm to revolutionize client management. Creating a culture which relies on innovative technology for efficiency can translate to improved client relationships driven by mutual trust and confidence.
Maintain Compliance
One of the most common reasons professional services don’t look to emerging technologies for document management is due to the lack of compliance across non-specific solutions. Most solutions claiming to solve document dependent work challenges fail to recognize the tedious tasks required for compliance in highly regulated industries, such as proper storage structures, naming conventions, access controls, retention, and disposal. Therefore, firms are left with stacks of documents—often left in the open for anyone to see, and are left to their own devices to properly comply with regulations.
However, there are solutions built to cater to these highly regulated industries. They will not only transform document-dependent work, but devise an easier—and automatic—way to stay compliant. As a player in a highly regulated industry, you must establish standards for how to consistently meet those requirements to avoid putting yourself and your clients at risk.
Document management can give you complete control over your documents and provide transparency over how they’re being created, accessed, modified, and deleted. Additionally, document management can help you adhere to document retention standards. Instead of having to set timers, or manual calendar reminders, a document management system can automatically delete documents after a specified time period.
Paired with automation, firms leveraging innovative solutions built with a suite of compliance tools can protect your firm’s most vulnerable data.
Adopt Cloud-Based Storage
Since processes run on data, you need to create an easily accessible (and secure!) way to manage your documents. A cloud-based storage solution enables your impact to be felt from anywhere.
There may be some objections from your team about how cloud storage stacks up to on-premise document storage solutions. In the regulated industries that professional services operate and serve, this is a valid concern. Fortunately, the right document management solution is not just secure, but it’s often even more secure and reliable than traditional storage solutions. A cloud-based document management system can lock specific documents and folders with role-based permissions for internal security measures, in addition to protection from external threats with encryption and data back ups.
Using cloud-based document management doesn’t only benefit your team, but it provides real value to your clients as well. They can still access the data they need from anywhere, while being assured that their information is protected.
In today’s remote-first work environment, firms are no longer limited by their geography. Cloud-based storage enables reachability to clients who are not physically nearby, and securely distribute client records to internal teams.
Businesses who take advantage of cloud-based storage also prepare themselves for the future by taking advantage of current opportunities that will continue to innovate and address professional services needs.
Conclusion
With document management, professional services teams have all the tools they need to keep up with emerging trends and tools. DMS is not a one and done solution, but it can actually scale with you while continuously undergoing updates and feature additions as an innovative technology. Document management is a proven solution that enables you to offer more to your customers, while providing you with results capable of changing the course of your business. To learn more, visit revverdocs.com.