226 Standardized Response Times in Accounting Firms

Most of us struggle to set standardized response times within an accounting firm because it's a hard thing to get a whole firm to commit to, but then.

Also a scary thing to, I don't know, guarantee.

Right.

So I've been sort of collecting some.

Ideas for how to think about standardized response times.

And what I found on the other.

Side of collecting these is it's actually a real opportunity to liberate you. On the one hand, it sort of feels restrictive like that you're going to hold yourself to this thing. I actually think once you set it up, it could have the opposite impact. Gonna run you through what I'm thinking on this these days.

Come on in, let's talk response times.

So response times.

I feel like we've talked about it.

Here and there in past episodes. I'm actually going to check this question at my my AI clone. It's trained on all past episodes of the podcast to kind of like set the foundation of what I feel like we've already covered. Cause I wanna go a little deeper with this episode. So talking with my AI clone now.

Hi, Jason here. How can I help?

I'm thinking through how to better set.

Communication expectations with my clients, like expected response, turnaround times. Can you walk me through just things I need to be considering here?

Absolutely. Happy to help. First off, think about setting clear boundaries right from the get go. It's like you wouldn't let someone text you at three in the morning expecting an answer before their first cup of coffee, right? Make sure your clients know when they can expect to hear back from you. This could be within 24 hours, 48 hours, or whatever works best for your workflow. Just be clear and consistent. Next, consider the complexity of the requests. Not all questions are created equal. Some might need a quick yes or no, while others require you to dig into the books or consult with a colleague. Let your clients know that response times can vary depending on the nature of their inquiry. Also, don't forget about setting up an autoresponder for times when you're out of the office or swamped. It's a simple way to manage expectations and keep communication lines open even when you're not immediately available. Lastly, remember that over communication is better than under communication. If you're running behind or a complex issue is taking longer to resolve, a quick update goes a long way in maintaining trust and transparency. How do you currently manage client communications and where do you see the biggest challenges?

Not bad. A bit of nuance there that honestly I didn't even really have in my notes for this episode is not all like, not all requests are made the same. And that kind of ought to go without saying. But if, for example, you go out and you say, okay, across the firm, we're going to have this 48 hour response time rule. You can also see how a client could potentially get bent out of shape when they throw you something wildly complex or when they're like, why can't you get me this bank statement that I need for my banker in less than 48 hours? When they like don't even have an accounting file. So anytime you, you. I'm actually glad I posed this question to. We need a name for whatever this thing is. So this whole AI avatar we've made, we made it in a past episode. I can, I can link that in the show. Notes what. I don't know what to call it.

Jason Bot Daily Bo Harold.

Anyways, I'm glad I threw this question in there because that nuance actually matters a lot. If we set up a expected response time, what falls within what you should tackle within that time versus what doesn't.

Not too dissimilar to.

Recently we talked about just how do you manage those quick questions. I think a response we need to identify as either something super, super quick or simply an acknowledgement like that may literally be all that the response is, is, hey, we got this. And within that response some sort of real general like, if I've got what I need to do the work right now, then I'll get this back to you in the next, you know, few days or something like that. So we are talking response time, which is not the same as resolution time. Right. Resolution is going to be very dependent upon what's the scope of what they're asking, what information you have, what you may need from them. Even. So this is just a response time, not a resolution time. Now, as with all things like client frustration around response times and all that, it purely comes up when there's a misalignment of expectations. I think a lot of the frustration with, I can say, at least in the US there's a lot of frustration with the veracity with which people run their accounting firms. And I don't know that folks outside our space realize just how in demand accountants and accounting firms are are. And anytime that's the case, I think you end up with a lot of people that are just like, well, I'm going to try exactly as hard as I want to try in this endeavor. And man, I'm not. I don't want to generalize and say that Everybody's this way. But oh my gosh, construction related stuff, a lot of stuff with trades. And again, not everybody is this way. Like it is so hard to get people to show up and follow through and be reliable and all that. And it's just because these people are like so bloody in demand. If it really hurt their business in a way that was like injurious to them, they wouldn't be this way.

But it's because they're so on demand.

That it's, I guess it's just not as big a deal. And this is absolutely the case for, for most mature accounting firms. So what's ultimately the incentive to the, to the firm owner to do it better? I mean, I think you can, you can actually run a much more profitable practice that people will actually be like pumped about and be champions of if you're more intentional about this. And so if, if you, if you want to take a week to respond to everything, or two weeks to respond to everything, honestly, that's completely fine. And the only reason your client's going to get bent out of shape is if they didn't understand that coming into the engagement or circumstances have changed and that's no longer adequate for them, which, that stuff happens. So no matter what, like when, when somebody's coming in, you ought to have an expectation that you set, because this is one of those things where normal for you, uh, may not be the same as normal for them. You may have a client coming to you who would just be tickled that their accountant will respond to them within 10 days because the last guy took weeks or months or something like that. That was my case switching attorneys. Like I, it was like, well, if I can get absolutely anything back from this person within a month, that's a win. And when the next person was like, yeah, gimme a couple of weeks, I'm like, wow, you just, you walking on water for me. Thank you. So that might be their expectation, but it could also be that they had this person on standby and would text them at the drop of the hat and that that previous person would swoop in and save the day. And so you could have two clients that otherwise look the same but are coming in with wildly different communication expectations. So if we don't address that up front, it's just a, it's a big potential unknown that you want to address. And most firms I think, simply haven't made a rule here because they haven't made a rule that they liked or they haven't been able to get everybody on Board with a singular approach. Not that it has to be a flat expectation for everyone. And that's what we're going to dig into is how you can actually the different ways you can set up these expectations. But it's. I think this is the case with a lot of change in accounting firms, especially the larger your team gets, the prospect of applying a change to your existing client base and the team and all of that, it's hard to get your head around. So, so you never make any rule and perpetually make your job harder as a result. As is the case with most things, any rule is better than no rule. An imperfect rule can be better than no rule just because of the, the, the upside of setting expectations and getting teams to change their habits and all that. Like it is. It's absolutely not a trivial thing to do. And so if you're like I was where maybe you're, you're coming into a firm with a bunch of folks that somebody else had hired and you've got sort of a mixed family sort of setup or, you know, the firm that you hired these people into is actually looking very different to the firm that you're running now. I think just asking. Sometimes just asking folks to change can be a challenge. If you can kind of make them feel involved in the journey and how you're trying to evolve and how you think it helps everyone, that helps. I didn't do enough of walking people through that in the beginning. I was just like, I know that this is better so we're going to do this now. That stuff all sits a lot better with people if they can understand like the direction that you're all trying to work towards. So eight things I jotted down here. Things to consider as you are considering developing a rule like this within your firm. Number one, every role within your firm needs a rule. And maybe the rules the same for everybody. But it oftentimes won't be. Expectations should probably depend on what you do. Because your expectation, if you're the firm owner, if you had a bunch of staff, almost certainly should not be the same expectation as your staff, as your admins, that sort of thing, as your virtual assistant, whoever it is. Think of this as like the, the setup I would expect is almost like a cascading level of availability down the, the skill chain, as it were. So the. Probably a better way to frame this. I was the lowest people on the skill chain are generally going to be most available with you being most scarce. And whether this is necessary or not is besides the point. The greatest upside of this natural effect of pushing your clients down the skill chain for the quickies. So when they, when they need something, clients are smart, they're going to figure out the quickest way to get what they want. And if you're reinforcing that by being always mega, mega attentive or more attentive than your staff, or not knowing how attentive your staff is, like not setting a rule and then realizing, like, oh, on average they respond in two or three days, maybe that's fine, but. But if you also respond in two or three days, your client's gonna go to you every single time. If you respond in one day, your client is never gonna go to that other person if that's supposed to be like the account manager or another person to support them. So that cascading, like, levels of availability has a fantastic effect not only on you, but if you have like, kind of a mid level folks or like senior technical folks, it's very beneficial for them as well, because it can push those conversations even further down the skill. And that was what our setup ended up being. Basically, you call the front desk anytime, and that person at the front desk, we would actually. The big hack was up leveling this person at the front desk to where they could handle more and more and more and more. But that person at the front desk was available immediately, right? Drop of a hat. As long as it was during business hours, you could get them. And so that was the bottom of the skill chain, as it were. Beyond that, the staff level folks had had a level of availability. And then myself and my partner, we had a different level of.

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Thought number two here. Every person doesn't have to be on every communications channel. So for example, some folks allow for testing, some don't. Whether people are allowed to text you, whether people are allowed to text your staff. Team chat apps like Slack, Microsoft Teams, that sort of thing. Not every single role, every single level needs to be available via that channel. One thing that often gets flipped upside down here is a business or a firm owner doesn't want his or her team to be able to text, but then they will text clients. And the impact this has is for clients that prefer text, when the only person that they're allowed to text is the owner, it means everything's going to go through the owner. So be mindful of what channels, different roles, different levels have access to, and watch out for that kind of inverse trap where the person that ought to be most scarce actually ends up being most available. And again, it's not a question of whether you're capable of it and whether you can manage it and manage the volume and all of that. It's a question of what you want the client behavior to be. Would they rather, would you rather them first go to the account manager, the admin, whoever that is? In most cases, the answer there is yes. And if it's not yes today, there will probably be a future date where it's yes. And so look at things like, you know, like, it's not hard to give your team abilities to text with clients. If that's your, if that's your client's preferred channel, that's great. But don't be the only one within the firm that can text. Right? Number three, consider what your rules look like for synchronous channels. Synchronous channels being things that need to be done live with two people, phone calls, live meetings, that sort of thing. If you end up with too many of these, they can really clog up your day because it requires putting everything down and getting to it at a specific time. So this is synchronous work. And this is kind of the beauty of the opposite asynchronous work. If instead of taking these meetings you could send a client a loom, then it's totally up to you to pack that work into wherever you have time. And the reality is, if you have three potential live meetings versus the ability to send three looms as alternative to meetings, taking those three meetings live will probably take, I don't know, 3x the time. If you, if you're thinking about like the time that it takes to get in and out of flow state and how those meetings are kind of scattered throughout the day, even if you're time blocking and trying to back to back those meetings. In my experience, those synchronous meetings just come with a lot more friction, not say it's a bad thing, it's just something we have to allow more time for. So what does the rule end up looking like then? For like synchronous meetings? If the expectation is I'll get back to you within 48 hours. Does that mean you'll hop on a live call with me in 48 hours? Maybe, maybe not. Maybe the answer for your team is different than the answer for you. Again, take care to ensure that you're not perpetually the most available person. The gotcha here that I think a lot of folks fall into is we've probably all known that person. I had actually made a short about this once. We all know that person that can never get caught up, but their phone is always ringing off the hook, and they always answer it. And so they've got this long list of stuff that they gotta do. Dumpster fires on the inbox, all these responsibilities. But if you want to talk to them on the phone, they will always pick up the phone. And for as long as you do this, you're training clients to call you, to jump to the front of the line. That's basically what's happening if all those other channels get backed up. And oftentimes people get excited when they're like, oh, let's add slack in here. This will make things way better, or add this or add that, when all it does is just add another horse race. Like, you've got. Just got one more channel to manage that just like jumped ahead of all the other channels, and you haven't solved the problem that is all of the other channels. But as long as somebody can call you and expect you to answer the phone if they want an immediate answer, why would they do anything else? Right? And so that's. If you're. If you're making a case for maybe how to have fewer calls within your firm, that's probably a great case for only taking scheduled calls. Because if there's not some buffer there and it doesn't need to be a. You know, doesn't mean you got to make them wait for a week or something like that. But unless there's some friction there, in many cases, a client will always just call you to get an immediate answer rather than sending you an email. And that might work for a while, but once you've got a bunch of clients who are calling you, that. That becomes really disruptive. So an example for, like, different rules for, you know, for synchronous channels. I think when you're setting that response time expectation, you're not resolving the problem within that timeframe. You're just responding. And so that response could be a scheduling link. And you can generally schedule, you know, anywhere beyond 24 hours out if you have availability 48 hours out, that sort of thing. Alternatively, you can make scheduling links available in certain people's email signatures on the website, maybe so maybe for the rest of your team it makes sense for them to have a scheduling link in their email signature and then you set the like with a calendar link or something like that. You can set a minimum number of hours in the future that the event has to be so they can't schedule something, you know, ten minutes from now. Again, I don't think, in most cases, I don't think your response time is going to be you can hop on a call with me within this time frame. I think that response time expectation is just going to be we're going to acknowledge this request and get you more information and get you probably an expected timeline for resolution within this timeframe.

But if you have clients who need.

To hop on calls, a lot probably makes sense to get them scheduling links for some part of your team. Maybe not yourself, but some part of your team. I'll add the caveat though, unless this.

Is what you want in a Q and A.

Recently we talked with a commenter on a pass pod that wanted to do less emailing and do more live meetings. So I guess it's, it's just a question of is your system or your lack of systems working like in your favor, like pulling everything in the direction that you actually want it to go. Number four, make a rule for asynchronous channels, email and team chat, that sort of thing. Watch out for team chat here. Oftentimes if folks pull you into a slack channel or teams or discord or something like that, there's an impression that it's going to lead to more instant answers and it just shouldn't. Team chat apps are nice because you can like rapid fire back and forth and figure something out with somebody. But the problem is if you, if you're just bolting on a new channel that is now faster than all the other channels, then like just know that's where everybody's going to go. And for the same reason that I wouldn't be excited about any client being able to call me anytime and expect me to pick up. I gotta watch out that I don't make the expectation that any client can slack me or teams message me at any time and expect me to respond right away. So I'd be careful about setting a response, expected response time and a team chat app that's any different than the expected response time for email or something like that. Again, just no, clients are like mice in a maze and like they will eventually find the Shortest path. And just keep hammering that shortest path. Like, absent any other. Any other boundaries. Right. Number five, what gets measured gets, I don't know, optimized.

What's the expression?

Some what.

What gets measured gets.

There's some last word there I'm missing. This whole policy loses some teeth if there isn't any aspect of. Of monitoring. This isn't because you don't trust your team. This isn't because you don't think that your team's doing a good job with this today. It's just because it makes everybody's lives easier. When you can communicate to the client a global expectation for how long things should take, it's as simple as that. Because every member of your team will have a different normal here.

And every member of your team's clients.

Are a little bit different. Where sometimes it's going to be totally fine, sometimes it may not be fast enough. I know. And in my team, I had folks that, like, prided themselves and giving the clients their cell phone number and letting the clients call them anytime. And like, they actually got a lot of fulfillment and satisfaction out of that, out of, like, being the hero. And then he had other people who are the. And how do I. How do I, I guess, accommodate that without, like, crushing the spirit of the person who. On the team who actually wants that? I think. I think the best thing you can do is set an expectation that is the minimum. You do have to sometimes protect your team from themselves if they're doing something that isn't going to be super scalable.

And you also have to be aware.

Of, like, what type of folks do you have in those communications roles? Oftentimes what we would find there is, like, we had folks that were just super suited to manage that communication, and that's what they really wanted to do. And so we would actually plug them into kind of a higher leverage. They had more people supporting them, and we're just handling more of the communications type of setup. You got to be careful that your overachievers don't take that too far, because when they get transition from person A to person B, if the minimum, say the minimum is 48 hours, you know, the minimum expectation for the firm is much worse than what somebody's delivering. You do, to a degree, need to look out for overachievers, potentially making that really hard for everyone else. But it's also one of those things where it's like, do I really want to, like, train that out of somebody? Like, if that's what they want to do? Like, that's energizing and fulfilling for them to be that plugged in. I know my clients will appreciate it, but just know that they're probably never going to stop doing that. Like it's probably going to have to be up to you to step in and be like, okay, let's, let's check this here. Like you've probably gone a little too far with this. And for your own well being, let's, let's talk about boundaries. Number six.

No update. Updates come standard. Make clear that if something isn't resolved.

Or they're waiting on you, you still have to update the client with an explanation. Explanation. So we're setting a response expectation, not a resolution expectation. If you don't have a res easy resolution within that time frame, then we still have to update them to say either we don't have an update or got it, we're working on it. Should be able to get this back to you in the next few days. Like you are kind of kicking the communication can down the road to give them an expectation of when they will hear back or who they will hear next from or what you recommended. Next steps are the very worst thing that we can do to a client is make them feel forgotten.

And so reaching out with the no update update.

Like it's an example of where over communication is just better than under communication.

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This is kind of an interesting one that I may actually help with. Self service can actually enable some permission to make these turnarounds a little longer. And if you're a, if you're a solo firm person here, you're going like well shoot, this is 100% me. Like how do I make this manageable? How do I balance keeping control of my time while also like being responsive for folks? I talked about this in the past with how my firm managed Covid Relief, but we had a really, really really good free Covid Relief support package where people would grab these templates and like we were making it as easy as possible for them to navigate all the legislation. Like we put a ton of investment into that. It was so good that there wasn't any that people needed us to do that for them. So then the paid options were like okay, you're too lazy to do it yourself. We're going to charge you Top dollar to help you with it because we were just so in demand. And if not for that free path, I don't know that we would not have felt great about standing up like this premium offering. Like it would have felt like, I don't know, price gouging. The fact that we had literally the best resources we saw anywhere on how to navigate all this stuff for free. We were like, no, like we don't feel bad about this. If you're not doing it, it's because you don't want to do it. And there's a version of this that like can enable folks to, to self service. So our AI assistant that we've, you know, we're just chatted with at the beginning here, if you stood up something like that and you gave your clients access to it, it's only ever going to be as good as the context that you provide it with. So like, do you have a blog, do you have a podcast, do you have a bunch of Common Q&As, do you do Q&As in a weekly newsletter? And now you've got a few months of that newsletter under your belt and you chuck all the Q&As and do a chatbot. It's unreasonable to expect clients to see into every single thing that you've said anywhere else online, right? To be able to get to that answer right away. And that's a great use case for chatbots. Like that's what they're really good at right now is pulling detailed information out of something out of like a really vast body of knowledge. So for you, for you, like self service for your clients, could look like chatbot, could look like a blog, could look like a sort of support platform, not unlike we have with our software tools. Interestingly, what's getting built into these help desk tools like the, the help desk platforms that are designed for support teams that are just responding to thousands of these, of these messages, you know, every hour. These are these software platforms for managing that scale of message. Like they're an interesting, a predictor of the sort of thing that may trickle down to the email tools that we use. But an interesting trend with those tools is, you know, how you get the auto response that says like, hey, we got your message, your ticket number, whatever. They're now actually just building answers into those responses using the exact same technology that we've, we use with this, this AI clone here that we've created based on my podcast. And so, you know, for example, if I had an email address where people could email questions into the podcast. It could do an auto reply. That is what that chat assistant's response would be. And we can tell it like in your best, like to the best of Your ability and 500 words write a response to this and cite a bunch of cite all of the external references so they can go out and find more information. And that's just the auto response. And so what these service platforms are doing is they'll get you an auto response and leave the ticket open by default. But the person can click a button that just says thanks. This answered my question immediately closes out the ticket. Human never had to do a thing. That sort of thing is really cool. That's, that's an area where practice management systems could actually be a big help with this. Practice management systems are the only ones with all of the client specific context too. That could even enrich those responses. So the tech here could actually get a lot better to where like an auto reply or something like that could make those self service answers even more compelling.

But I do think the more stuff.

You give away, the more you can feel justified in setting a higher wall and a maybe longer response expectation. And for you that's great trade off because the stuff you're giving away, those are assets that you're going to have forever and that stuff's just going to keep getting better and better. People can come get that stuff like as much as they want and you're genuinely, even though you're not doing it in a hands on way, you're providing more value at a larger scale because those people can come get that stuff without you having to lift a finger.

Last one, number eight. Don't let anyone tell you what's normal. If you just follow what other firms do, what's the point of having your own firm, right?

Like that's kind of the beauty of getting to make up your own rules. I mean it's not to say it's not a bad idea to be mindful of what other firms do and pay attention to that. But also if you just copy everybody else kind of what's the point of making your own thing, right? I was reading about a business coach that charges 100k per session and clients have to come and meet him at his home in Mesa, Arizona. That great. Imagine being that in demand. Cal Newport Book so good they can't ignore you.

I'm thinking about, you know, we talk.

About rituals and recurring formats and content and all of that and I'm always thinking about like what are some formats for Jason Daly that, that I Could keep dipping back into. I think we're going to test out a big one next week where we dedicate a whole week to a specific topic. We previously did this on office setups. This next week, we're going to do it on transitioning a firm to more scheduled work. It's going to be a bunch of interviews that are kind of chopped in. Like, I'm. I'm doing, like, asynchronous interviews with folks where I pull in basically a whole bunch of people's experiences. Because I think equally, if not more important to hearing from me, here's a totally logical explanation for why XYZ is better. It's really helpful if you can hear real stories from people who have actually done it. Like, those two things working together make that much more powerful. I know for me, one person can tell me a good idea, and I'm like, dang, that's cool. That's novel. If five or 10 people are like, I've done this and had great success with it, I'm like, okay, that's a lot more real for me now I'm going to look at that in a different way. So that whole, like, dedicating a week to that sort of thing I've been thinking about as a recurring format, maybe we do that once a month. We're going to do that on. Moving to scheduled work, thinking about doing that for offshoring, mainly just to hear people's stories. Not even to like, pull you one way or another, just to learn more. Another format I've been thinking about is, like, there's some books that are just super, super meaty. And even the books we've gone through on this podcast, when I do a day on them, it's just like, you're getting like, 5% of it. There's some books that are just so good to where I'm thinking about. You do a week on it. Not that it's like a book review, but it's like, these are all standalone, helpful episodes that are inspired by some part of the book. And so whether you've read the book, whether you've heard the other episodes or not, you come in and, like, you get a bit of that, and maybe it sends you down to go read the book down the road, maybe not. But thinking about doing this on. On Cal Newports, so good they can't ignore you because it's not only relevant from a, like, career advice, being an accounting professional standpoint, but also from a firm standpoint. Our goal is for our firm to be so good that Beekeepers can't ignore us, that the perfect fit client has to come and work with us. And so that's another, like, recurring format I'm thinking I could build into the end of the podcast. Again, when you think of content, when you're thinking, like, how do I keep getting in front of clients with the same message, think rituals, it makes it so much easier. Those formats that you can keep coming back to so you're not constantly reinventing the wheel anyways, so good they can't ignore you. Imagine being so good and so unique that you just get to make the rules. Like that guy. Yep. It's going to be 100k per session and you have to come meet me in person at my house in Mesa, Arizona.

It's ridiculous, right? But that guy's doing it, bless his heart.

I see stuff like that and I'm like, man, that person is like, what an absolute unit. That's just awesome. One last kind of like takeaway here, like, asterisk on all this stuff. Don't let anybody tell you what's normal. When you set these expectations, you should still set an expectation. That guy, he has rules. You're going to pay me this. You're going to meet me here on my terms. Like, that's great. He's got expectations.

People don't like that they're not going to do it.

If somebody signed up and then he was like, oh, no, you got to fly out here. And he only, only told him, then, like, sure, they're going to be. They're going to be annoyed. Right? If you have this. Sometimes you see this with software companies where different tiers, there's different, very explicit, like, support levels. If you follow this all the way through, I'd be super curious to hear your experience. Please share in the comments. What's worked, what hasn't worked, anything folks ought to look out for. Because it's one of the most, if not the most common frustration from clients. My accountant isn't responsive enough. Well, what does that mean? Like, what was your expect? How are they not meeting it? And how can we use these expectations and kind of that cascading availability to send clients to the right person with question in hand, rather than just jumping straight to the big boss, Right? Like, does your system lead them to the right person?

Good food for thought.

If you've walked through this, please share your experience below. It'd be great to hear. I'll see you tomorrow.