What should happen during offboarding? | Accounting Business Example

We are going to just test and see if this works. Hopefully you can hear me. We're going to be testing this out. Hello. Hello. If you can hear me, if this is all working, let me know in the comments. All right, today, what I want to talk about is workflows. And based on hopeful, wishful thinking here, I'm going to hope that this is all coming through. Let me just do a quick test. All right. It sounds like there is sound coming through. Awesome. Okay, so today I want to talk about offboat, offboarding workflows. And offboarding is just a fancy word for kicking people out or exiting your clients from your world. So if you think of about your business as a machine, it's doing its thing. Let's just imagine that's a cog. When people come into your business, that is onboarding, you serve them, you make the money, you do the thing, whatever it is, the widget you are selling, that's the machine of your business. And when you're done, when they have finished whatever service or product you're selling them. We are in the world of offboarding. Just to orient ourselves between these two points, we hopefully will have people going from onboarding back to offboarding because they're buying from us again or, or something like that. And that is what I call the nurturing process. You might also call it sales or resale or post purchase, follow up, whatever you want to call it. So we've got nurturing, onboarding, offboarding, and we've got service or fulfillment. Fancy words for the same thing. Actually, you know what, let's keep those on there. We're going to make our pen a little bit smaller so that you can see a little bit more clearly what's going on here. All right, so today what we're going to be focusing on is this offboarding piece. And I'm going to be talking through a workflow that I just experienced as a client and just going to be talking through kind of how it worked and together find some ways that we could improve it. Because that's the fun of all this, is you don't need to know a ton about the business, you don't need to know a ton of context to be able to start improving people off boarding, onboarding service or nurturing. It's just certain best practices around making sure that your clients feel taken care of. So the off boarding I just went through went something like this. This is from an accountant. So I know we have some people who are in accounting and bookkeeping in this group. So you might Find this particularly interesting. So it was an accountant and they were giving the end of year tax information. Tax information in the US that is a wonderful activity that we usually do in April this year. It's a little bit weird, but nonetheless, here we are. So the offboarding process, which again is starting after the service is done, meaning the taxes are prepared for this company, was it kicked off with an email after a long period of silence, just complete. No, no word, nothing. Imagine that's a hand saying, shh. After a long period of nothing, they sent a long email and it came in electronically with no real warning. And it just had a ton of information in that email in it, it had a link to say where you were supposed to go to get your full tax information. So that's the first step in our process. From there, you had to find the link, click on the link, go to a page, log in, and then get into their client portal. In that client portal, which looked something like this, there were a ton, a ton, a ton, a ton, a ton, a ton of folders and files. Oops caps lock is on, in case anyone was wondering. So all of these files were in there and you had to go through them. And this was a very old school kind of file system, wasn't even as fancy as Dropbox or anything that we might be used to. And you had to go through all of these folders. So sifting through, I would say probably 12 to 18 files to find the files that were relevant to your actual returns, the stuff that they talked about over here. So flipping through the file folders, we went through the process. We were able to find the folder that had the thing that we were actually looking for. Once you open the folder, you found more files. Eventually you had to click through the, say 50 to 60 pages of information to find the one that had the actual relevant information in terms of what you needed to know about your taxes, how much you had to pay, how much you got back, all that stuff in those folders. There was also another piece of important information in those folders. They had their invoice. Now, of course, I'm not mapping this very beautifully here, but I'm just trying to convey kind of what the experience was like. So there was an invoice tucked into these folders saying, here's what we're charging with three simple line items. And back here in this original email, there was. Oops, excuse me for that. There was a warning to pay within 14 days, even though in the US taxes and such have changed to give us a little Bit more time to pay the actual tax payment. So pay in 14 days. Go filter through all this stuff to try to find where your file is. By the way, you have to pay us. This is the amount which we didn't tell you before. Good luck. And that was the offboarding experience I just went through with an accounting company. Now you're all smart business owners. You are all whatever you're doing, whether you're an accountant, a bookkeeper, a web designer, a coach consultant, you can look at this workflow and make some assumptions about what the feeling was at each stage. And we're going to map that here. I'm going to do a different color just to get us a little bit of impressions. So in the beginning, here we are, there's some curiosity. We finally got our taxes back and now we're trying to figure out what exactly is it going to be inside. So we get this email, we start reading it, and we switch to the space of overwhelmed, trying to figure out what the heck is actually going on in this really, really long email. Once we go from there, we switch over to a space of confusion. Consider myself pretty tech savvy, but trying to find where in that mass of folders I was supposed to be looking was a total mess. No instructions over here. Just go find it wherever you need to find it. From there, we finally found the folder, we found the information we were looking through. By this point, you're feeling pretty tired trying to just find where's the information that I need. And then, surprise, there's that invoice tucked in there. The overall emotional roller coaster of this off boarding didn't really leave any moments where me as the client could feel, wow, they really care about me. There was no moments that I would rave about with you going live today. Of course, they didn't know I was going to be going live today talking about their off boarding experience. But this experience of feeling like, wow, what a great final impression, nowhere in here did that come up at each moment. It was just kind of, there was friction, there were searching. Everything was on me as the client and there was no real communication. As much as I love email, which I don't really love email, a long email like this email, that's three to five paragraphs, that's really more like a college essay or college essay, a high school book report length, that does not count as communication in my book. And I want to dive into that a little bit more. When we've got a long email as our main kickoff to offboarding, we introduce this feeling of overwhelm paragraphs upon paragraphs of information with no additional context. Sorry, I've got fat hands here. It leads to skimming, so the information isn't coming in. Jumping right to the point wherever we see a link. And again, we're not adding any, as I'll call it, squishy stuff. We're not adding any love here, which we could be. We skip, we jump and we skip the squishy. So how could this process, just focusing on this very first introduction. Hey, your taxes are done. Tax is ready. How could that be done in a different way? I'm just going to take one piece here. Imagine this is your workflow. If you're watching this, tune in and leave me a comment. What do you think could be done better here? Because I've got some ideas sitting here. Reading this long paragraph obviously took me into this place of like, what? Huh? This is overwhelming. Taxes are scary. Instead, what if we flipped gears and we reimagined this email, this piece of content in a different way. Imagine this email. You open it and it had a video. Not a newsletter, just embedded video 101 to me. Hi, Layla. And in it, my accountant had taken the time a little bit too small there. Let's, let's draw that one again. Hi, Layla. Here's a video. Here's the link. Joe. Let's just imagine my account's name is Joe. Imagine how different the email would feel if three to five paragraphs of information was instead a three minute video directly from my accountant. It would have to be custom made. And I recognize they might have hundreds of clients that they're doing their tax returns for, but in three minutes in front of a video, what could that accountant tell me in three? You know, face to face human interaction? I think you could go something like this. Let's imagine this is Mr. Or Mrs. Accountant. You know what? Let's, let's be. Let's go Jane. Let's try to make this more. Come on, ladies. This is Jane in front of the camera, which they have set up in their office. And in this video that they do in a batch for every single client, they say generic information about how thankful they are for getting the opportunity to work with us. Maybe they want to introduce some information. Write it about COVID 19 because that's what's on everyone's mind. They want to maybe highlight that the due dates in the US have changed. And then finally, on a piece of paper that Jane might have in front of her, she might want to read off. Hey, by the way, by the way the key information you're wondering is going to be found in the folder called this, called whatever. If they wanted to get fancy with their production and again, this is right now we're at three minutes. Maybe they want to cut to a scene that they might have templated as the exact same for every single person of a screenshot, something like this, a screen share of people going into that folder system and showing you exactly where with maybe a big old arrow, which that arrow should be in a different color, a big old arrow pointing to where the important folder is that you need to access and where the invoice is. I think pointing out that the invoice is there and explaining why it's important that they get paid within 14 days in a human way versus a line in a 3 to 5 paragraph email would have just changed the entire attitude. Now, I know we're talking hypotheticals here, but if you had received this email, this video, as opposed to the 3 to 5 paragraph your taxes already email, would you have a different impression? Maybe it's just me, but I sure would. So I'm going to erase this for now. I'm going to take a moment here and explain why the heck I'm even talking about this. Oops, sorry. Accounting. It's not just about changing the emotions that are happening at each stage of the journey, although that would certainly be helpful. The reason I'm talking about workflows in a group where we talk a lot about software and tech is because I believe that if we can get. Oops. If we can get our workflows right, the fundamental steps, if we can define those in a way that makes sense, then we can turn to the software and input all of these things. This workflow is what guides everything. And when we just dive too quickly into the software or dive too quickly into writing the email without thinking about all the steps involved, I think we do ourselves a disservice. I'm sorry, that keeps popping up. So. So that's why I'm talking about workflows today and the power of workflows to guide and help you make easy work of setting up all of this software. So right now we know that if we liked this workflow, if we liked this potential emotional change for our clients, then we could easily just say, all right, what tool is going to let us embed a video into our emails? And what tool will have the security settings that we need? Since we're talking about taxes or whatever else might be something like loom or dub, etc. But we start with the workflows. So that is why we're talking about this today. Let's keep going. Let's keep talking about how we could change this. Assuming we're keeping with the email, change the way that the email looks, change that emotion. The next step is logging in. So you have to log into their client portal to access the forms. I think it's safe to say with tax information, you're probably always going to have that login experience. But I wonder if there's some stuff we can do here to make it a bit easier. I think the example we already put where we were in this video. Hello, Facebook. Thanks, Facebook, where we had back here that we would walk them through, a screenshot of how to log in and how to access your files would be a huge way to improve this first step of the process. So we're warning them in this initial email, we're warning them exactly what they're going to need to do next. We are over communicating. We are prepping our client to keep that happy demeanor as they go through each step of the process to come. All right, let's keep going. So we've logged into the client portal. We're looking at all these files again. This process right here of trying to find the right file would probably be helped by having more explanation early. I think if there's a theme that you're probably picking up with this offboarding, just like every other phase of workflows, it's communicate early and often. Communicate, communicate again. Tell them what you're going to do. Tell them what you're doing. Tell them what you just did. Repeat it, repeat it, repeat it. So that way there's no chance of feeling this way. Especially if you're working in a space like, like taxes, where, let's be honest, taxes aren't anyone's. Well, for some people maybe, but taxes are not usually a place where you get this kind of emotion. So if you're working in a space with a lot of anxiety, it's really, really important to focus on that communication piece because you know there's going to be anxiety there. You know, that's part of the name of the game, you know, to anticipate that. So make sure you are being proactive in preventing that sense of overwhelm and stress. All right, so we're here in these folders. Maybe we gave them a tour. So that way they know exactly which folder is important to them and which ones they can ignore. Now they've gotten into the folders once again. Here, our communication at the beginning has helped them understand what they're going to be seeing at each step. They could even follow along with this video as they're going through the rest of the process in case maybe they're a little less tech savvy and confused as to which of the files they need to open. If we had called out in the video that hey, you'll see on page whatever of your report the information you need to know or hey, in this folder you'll see the information that's really important to you, we might have avoided some of this exhaustion in trying to find the relevant information. Additionally, and I'm going to just put in here as something else. Taxes in the US are convoluted, and I think that's form of art almost and how confusing and convoluted our tax system can be. But the way taxes are filed are if you're not in the US There's a big old packet of information that's prepared by your accountant. It's given to you basically saying, hey, here's what we did. This is what you owe. Go do it. And it can lead to a lot of feelings of distrust or just uncertainty. Looking at that 50 to 60 to 70 to 80 to 90 page document, trying to figure out how to make heads or tails of it. If I was this accountant, and I knew that that was a very real fear that I was working with clients, especially you're working with new business owners or business owners that just weren't as savvy, I might consider in that folder, say we have a folder called Tax Returns. We have a tax returns folder in that folder. I know I have a bias towards video. I might have a video uploaded, same one for every client talking about how to make sense of your tax returns. It might be again, Jane the accountant walking through an actual form on the screen to explain what each line item means. I know I've been using a lot of video examples here, but you can also do the same with a PDF or an ebook, a digital book talking through how to make sense of your accounting. I think so often we focus on content as sales when in industries that rely on expertise, we can improve customer experience by including education, educational content in the journey. It's not a sales tool, it's a customer support tool. And if you're using it for sale, recycle it and put it here as well. How much of a difference would that have made? To open this file, see this, see open this folder, see this overwhelming book, but then see a video that we could watch first Maybe the video was even called Watch first, explaining why not to be overwhelmed, how to make sense of it, and why, if you have any questions, to contact us. Not only would that provide a little bit of support, which is always important, but it would also provide an opportunity, a call to action, to hire us again. If I was the accountant firm and I wanted to also sell maybe some consulting or I wanted to sell additional services, or maybe you do strategy sessions. Hey, I know this is confusing. If you're overwhelmed right now, hire us for our quarterly planning stuff. You could have planned ahead. We could do this. So next year, give us a call right now, and we'll book you for the next year for 2021 or 2020, rather, the 2020 tax year. Let's plan. Let's get quarterly planning on the calendar for you if you're really overwhelmed. So that's how we're using education to provide support while also making it clear how you can get additional help. What we don't want to do, which is what ended up happening in this scenario, is take someone in, give them this big document, and then just silence, Making it very clearly feel that, all right, here it is. Now pay us. It feels very transactional versus this kind of supported, I'm here for you kind of piece that we want. Oops, that's supposed to be a play button. You know what I mean? I'm gonna keep that video there as an example of how we could maybe do this a little bit different ebook as well. All right, so in. All right, now, what we've talked about is adding three minutes. Let's just. Let's just expand it. Let's say we're really slow at video. We've added 30 minutes into the prep of the client work. We've renamed our files, which takes about 30 seconds, and then we just copy it for everybody. And we've added some repeatable assets that make us. Maybe they take us half a day. If we're really slow, we take half a day to create, but then we just use it for every single client. Wash, rinse, and repeat. But I think it's pretty clear how this would already change the feeling that we're giving our clients. Just go a little happier at each step of the way. All of a sudden we start feeling cared for instead of like a commodity who is just receiving an invoice out of nowhere. All right, let's keep going on here. If you have any ideas, let's just flip over to this in case you're watching on silent. If you have any ideas. For how this workflow could be better. Leave them in the comments and we will work them in. This is by no means a right or wrong dichotomy here. This is all about style and brand. So it's a spectrum. What's right for one person is going to be wrong for another. But in this situation, I'm talking about trying to bulk the normal vibe of an accountant and in this case, adding a little bit more care, a lot. A little bit more modern. A little bit more modern support could provide a lot of help along the way. So back to here. We're in the folder. We've got that last little piece of what, what this offboarding process was, and that is the invoice. Now, in this invoice we have three line items. And I didn't spell what they are. Let's say there's something like tax return, tax return, maybe security something, and let's call it personal taxes. Each one is a lump sum. Each one is a lump sum of this, this and that, and a total at the bottom pay. That's what our invoice looks like. Now, I know a lot of the times when we're talking about systems and workflows, we get excited about the sexy stuff. But if there's a theme you might have noticed so far, it's the not sexy stuff that presents a unique opportunity for us to just do things a little bit better. In this case, I'm talking about how we can modify this invoice to add a bit of personality. So we've got this invoice in here and we know that our clients, at this point, we know our clients generally are feeling kind of maybe jaded at this point. Maybe their tax bill wasn't so good and so they're feeling kind of stressed and they know you're a good investment. But still, people aren't in a great mood by the time they get to the invoice point. So how can we make this invoice more interesting or just more empathetic? First of all, we could have a message that says, hey, I understand that this can be a scary time. This is why it's still important to pay us. That might be too casual for you. We could include a message of thanks. Thanks for trusting us with your taxes. Here's all the time that went into it. An easier thing might be to actually add just descriptions to the line items here. With all service businesses, there's this level of skepticism that comes with invoicing, especially if you're someone that invoices like this where it's one line item, maybe it just says consulting, consulting, $5,000 pay. I mean, there is this skepticism that comes with services, that the pricing is made out of thin air. You know, the price just comes out of the cloud or whatever they feel like charging you. And so there's this feeling of being able to barter. It's like a car dealership telling you how much the car is worth. Is it really worth that? Or are they just trying to get a quick buck? What we want to prove here or validate is that there was indeed time and effort and energy spent in being intentional throughout this process. So by having our invoice be more detailed, we could help with that. So here we see tax return, and there was a few other line items. They had no description. If we added a description template for everybody of what exactly that means, what is the work that goes into preparing the tax return that would help show justification of the price? When you're shopping online, I like to use this as an example. If any of you shop online, I'm sure many of you do, especially during COVID When you're shopping online, you've got your online shopping cart and you are going through and you are going through your cart and you're ready to check out, and you've got all the line items in your cart, and they look something like this. You've got your quantity and then the total over here on the right side. And then there's a big old pay button. Usually it's a fun color. So if you're doing that, do you ever notice that vistaprint, Amazon, any tool that you're on, they actually show an image of what you're about to buy next to the purchase. In fact, the images are usually quite large. It's a smiling picture of the dog playing with a new toy or whatever it is that reminds you at the very last second that, yes, of course you want to buy that, because this is what you're buying. I don't know if you're familiar with that. Maybe that's just me, who knows who is hyper aware of that. But when you're in your cart, it's almost like the future is taunting you with the possibilities of what would happen if you just go ahead and click that buy button. You feel me? All right, so when we are writing our invoices, why do we not imitate that just a little bit to again make it clear that we are not just making our price out of thin air? This is what you have purchased. Whether it's an image if you're selling something that is conducive to creating images or maybe it's a description where if you're doing something that's more consulting style or something like a tax return. These invoices, while yes, they're just a recap of what we've done, they can be an opportunity to make sure we are paid on time every time. And we're clearly showing why, why you're paying this amount for our services. If you're doing a post pay, which is what this, this accountant is you're paying afterwards, it's very important that you emphasize what all that you've put into it so that you're ensuring, well, or at least helping persuade individuals to make sure that they're paying you for the value that you've done. So that is kind of a thought. On the invoice here we've got terms and other things. Another important piece that was not on this particular invoice that I noticed that I want to draw attention to is a call to communicate. If you have not seen a theme here with the way I'm reviewing this workflow, you communication is everything. Especially when we are in a space with high levels of anxiety, uncertainty, fear. I mean, I don't know what taxes make you feel, but very few people feel happy from them. When we know we've got these things going up against and we want our clients to somehow walk away feeling like they are on top of the world, we need to do a lot, we need to do a little bit extra here to make sure that we get this end result from our clients. It's a lot different than if you're running a spa, if you're a lawyer, if you're an accountant, you're probably working with people when they're in a pretty rough spot, or at least not a very happy state. So we need to do a little bit extra to make them walking away so that they want to tell everybody that they know that, wow, this accountant is the best person ever. I would never do anyone, I would never hire anyone else for my taxes but them. So these little things, having a call to communicate on your invoice, things like, do you think something's wrong? Let us know. I forget which restaurant it is. Now, maybe one of you watching here would remember, but there's a fast food chain. Oh man, which one is it now? I can't remember, but there's a fast food chain that has a receipt, just a normal receipt. And I'm going to point this out here because again, we can Borrow things from other industries. Their receipt looks something like this. It's got their logo, which I wish I could remember which one it is right now. They've got all the line items at the bottom, they've got the total of what you paid. And then it has this message saying if something's wrong with your order, even if it's okay with you, it's not okay with us. Tell us and we will make it right. Basically, if something's wrong, you are not bothering us. It is this receipt. Actually, you know what I think it is? I'm pretty sure it's Panera. If any of you are familiar with the food chain Panera, I know some of you, Carol Kuhl, if any of you are watching that, some of you are quite familiar with Panera. But their receipt actually asks you, it begs you to come forward if something's wrong because, and maybe you haven't heard this stat before, maybe you have. Only a small percentage of people who have had something wrong will actually tell you about it. And I don't remember the exact percentage, but let's just assume it's 20%. I think that sounds high. 20% will tell you if something is wrong, but the other 80% will just walk away knowing that something is wrong. And when they go and have a conversation with a friend about, say, that Panera, they might mention it, but they've never told you, then that friend that they told about is going to keep it in their mind that that Panera or that accountant gets things wrong. So by having this receipt ask and solicit negative feedback, they ensure that more than just this, they make sure that more than just this 20% is actually being served and resolved. So that way that when they walk away and they're having that conversation with their friend, the conversation goes a little different. Rather than talking about how bad something is, they can at least say, say, not think they can say, you know what, it was bad, but then they made it right. And that's why overall, I would definitely recommend them. Again, that's a lot different than leaving the last impression as, look, they wrote my invoice wrong, or I don't understand why my invoice was that way. Looping back to our actual example, I think that was pretty sure that's Panera. If not, I just gave them an unwarranted shout out in our invoices. Having a call to communicate if anything is wrong, if anything's confusing, if anything's unclear, that could again help us here. Now, I've been ripping apart this Workflow here. This is a very simple. We're only at three or so steps here, but already the last issue. I'm going to just point out and maybe some of you are following along, maybe this is total craziness to you, is that this whole process ends too soon. That is the last and major issue about this offboarding. This is the last piece. This is the last interaction they have with you unless you don't pay. If you don't pay your invoice, they'll chase you down. And while that's fun, well that's like, that's definitely important to chase people down when they don't pay you. We don't really want that to be our last impression. Asking for money isn't the best ending for any relationship. Instead, I would love to see this, this accountant do some additional follow up one week later, regardless of the state of the invoice, check in to see if there's any questions or to push the strategy session or whatever it is they do. Maybe two weeks later or two months later, depending on how stressful stressed your clients are, you come back and you ask for a review or for feedback. Again, we're soliciting the bad news rather than waiting for it to go out into the world and be talked about amongst friends. Maybe it's a phone call. Maybe they could give a phone call to anyone they know is having struggle, strouble struggle. Oh my goodness. People. People who are having maybe trouble logging in. Maybe our systems are sophisticated enough that we can see who's seen this folder and we add a step in here. If we see that people haven't opened this folder in 48 hours, we give them a call saying, hey, need help? There is so much we can do to build on this experience so that the last impression a client has is not giving us, just giving us money. Our last impression should be one of helping them, not one of them helping us. Granted, we've done our stuff, we've done our service, they do need to pay us. But do we really want our last impression to be that of just being a collections to just being a commodity? No, we're service business. Our last impression should be one of service. And so that's my workflow here. That's my workflow review for this accountant company for a tax return. This is a basic, super basic offboarding flow going from the final, going from the final delivery of services which is right here, well, and so on down to that final invoice collection and then adding on some pieces to actually wrap up the relationship in a meaningful and human and squishy way. What we need to then do, and we can talk about this in a future session here, is if we go back to this main map, let's get rid of some of this so we don't clutter our view. If we go back to this, we've just talked about offboarding, we've talked about the main way to get someone out of the machine. Give them the final deliverables, get them to pay you all that stuff. Got all those boxes checked, but now we need to get them back into our nurturing sequence, which is basically staying in touch. And that's what I'm going to be talking about next week. When we're talking about nurturing, we're going to talk about how to segue from finishing up a project to hey, maybe you want to start another in a that's not how you spell another in a non spammy, not salesy, not chasing you for money kind of way. Of course, all that's easier if you end things on a really, really positive, happy and client centric note. So that's it for this video. If you guys have any thoughts, feel free to leave them in the comments. I understand this time of day might not be best for everyone to tune on live, but if you have thoughts about how you would improve this workflow, if you have ideas for how we could continue to spice this up, if you have questions about how or why I'm talking about workflows in a technology setting, definitely let me know. I'm going to leave with a brief recap of that answer. Actually, the reason I focus on workflows first, first workflows, then technology, then documentation is because workflows are where we decide what we want our customer experience to be. Then we use that to determine what technology we want, what's our employee experience, what is the software that our team needs to deliver that workflow. And finally, we write all of that down so it's a repeatable system so that we, the owner, can have the wonderful experience of sitting back and relaxing at the beach while our team is able to do all the things they need to do without constantly putting out fires or handling all the unexpected scenarios. So that is kind of the bridge that we're building. And we're doing it in this order. So we're not getting ahead of ourselves. We're not getting distracted by shiny features and technology that we don't need. We're not getting overwhelmed in settings by trying to put a square peg in a round hole by trying to make technology do things that it can't or shouldn't do. Instead, we're focusing on what we want first. Then we bring what we actually want and need, not just the shiny objects. We bring it to life and then we make it repeatable. And today we're just talking about this first piece of it. But that is the end goal, to get, get us to this point of having the full CEO of experience of workflows, tech and documentation all together. So that's it for this video. I'm going to wrap it up there. Thank you so much for watching. Let me know what you think about this format, whether this has been an enjoyable viewing experience, and leave me a comment with the word replay. If you're watching live, shoot me a comment in there now and I will be back with you in some other videos coming up soon. You'll also see some new posts coming out on the YouTube channel. So thanks so much for watching, watching and have a good one. All right, now I gotta figure out how to get out of here, people.