Approaches to modernising technology and processes at your professional services firm

Some approaches to modernising technology and operations at your professional services firm

Professional services firms that have been going for any length of time inevitably look to improve their technology, whether it’s to increase efficiency or expand their service offerings.

There are some basics that are right for just about everybody, like moving to cloud-based software and adopting digital collaboration platforms such as Slack or Teams, but moving beyond the basics involves understanding both your firm and the various approaches available.

This post will try to give an entry-level overview of a few of those approaches. There are about as many approaches as there are firms, so it won’t be exhaustive and it won’t be in-depth, but hopefully it will give you a place to start thinking about things.

Client Portals

A client portal is often a good place to start - instead of having documents scattered throughout emails, a client portal allows them, and you, to have everything in one place. It’s more secure, it’s more organised, there’s a document history, they can upload as well as download, it can integrate with your practice management and other systems to provide notifications and ensure all client info is easily accessible, it can provide a way to expose clients to additional services, and it might be the lowest cost thing on this list to implement.

Some practice management systems include a client portal, but in our experience these can be limited enough that they sometimes make for a worse customer experience. Other options include building on a content management system like Wordpress (highly customisable but insecure), using a CRM like Hubspot or Zendesk (secure and quick, but not very customisable), or creating a bespoke system based on a popular framework (secure and customisable, but not quick).

Automation

Taking existing manual processes and automating them using Robotic Process Automation, where software replicates the steps a person would take, is another common option.

Small implementations, like automatically filling in forms based on provided data, can be simple and quick to do, but larger implementations can be expensive and tricky, requiring extensive customisation of complex tools like UIPath or Power Automate. Saving multiple hours per day across a large team can make this approach very worthwhile, but for small and mid-size firms it’s usually only worth doing a few of the more high-impact, low-complexity processes at best.

Workflow Management

Workflow management is the cause of many inefficiencies, which is why practice management systems often make it the centrepiece of their offerings. In fact, if you’re a firm in a standardised area like accounting or law, a practice management system will give you a basic start at most of the things on this list, and should be your first thought.

If you’re in a less standardised area, such as strategic advice or risk management, there probably isn’t a practice management system that suits you. Larger firms often find it worthwhile to create a bespoke system that covers the majority of their workflows and data, but smaller firms may find it more economic to customise SAAS tools that cover parts of their workflows and link them together with a good data platform.

Data Management

Data is the lifeblood of a professional services firm - collating it, structuring it, understanding it, and developing insights based on it. Despite this, data is often left in disparate places like file servers and CRMs, unable to be searched or shared between tools.

Data left untended in multiple places will often become contradictory over time, insights derived from partial data tend to lack nuance, and time spent collating or searching is time that could be spent thinking.

Establishing a good data lake, accessible, secure, and resilient, is worthwhile for its own sake, but can also be a prerequisite for effectively implementing many of the approaches mentioned here.

Unfortunately, there’s no one-size-fits-all strategy for managing your data. It takes an understanding of your firm’s goals, your data, your existing tools, your budget, your compliance requirements, and where your firm prefers to be on tradeoffs between competing priorities like security and convenience. Every firm’s mix is unique, and will often change over time.

Process Reengineering

Rather than automating an existing process, sometimes there’s an opportunity to completely rethink your approach such that the process is no longer needed at all.

For example, one firm we worked with found they were spending too much time each day chasing up the status of work, and the associated documents and other information. They could have automated these update requests, but saw an opportunity to change the way they approached sharing information about work throughout the firm.

They decided to implement a workflow automation system that helped track and coordinate the status of all tasks and the information associated with them. Using an internal website, partners assigned predefined tasks to associates. Documents were attached, and information like the work history of the client, contact details, and email exchanges were all automatically added. Associates could send work to be reviewed, seek advice from partners when they needed help, and request information from clients as needed. Work status was automatically updated as documents were filled out and contacts were made.

Now, the status of every piece of work the firm was doing was available immediately from a single screen, with the ability to drill down to any degree of detail. Updates were sent out automatically at the beginning of each day, and clients had a secure portal to send and receive documents. The process of requesting updates on client work didn’t need to be automated because the whole approach had changed into something much more efficient.

This approach is often called process reengineering, but that’s really just a catchall name for doing things a better way. Beware, this approach often has the biggest benefits, but it can also be the most involved to implement.

AI

There has been a lot of hype about how AI can automate work and improve decision-making, but it truly can be game-changing.

Some of the basic opportunities, like automatic document management or email handling, are relatively easy to implement, sometimes even built into the services you already use.

There are also several third-party AI-based services that can address specific problems, such as note-taking during meetings or enriching data based upon what you already have. These are tools we use every day at 25x, and our business wouldn’t run nearly as smoothly without them.

Like most new technologies though, to get the most out of AI you need people who know both the technology and your business well enough to understand how they fit together. (Not a coincidental plug, that’s why a technology company with lots of experience in professional services firms can be useful!)

The other thing AI can do is help you offer new services, either because the work was unable to be done economically or because it simply wasn’t possible. Often these services are cheaper, lower-end versions of existing services, like those AI note-takers, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have value to clients, or that their margins can’t be significant.

Three things are important to consider when creating new services:

• your insight into the needs of your customers,
• an understanding of the technology required to deliver the new service, and
• experience in the processes required to successfully bring new products to market, such as customer validation and iterative course-correction.

Conclusion

There are a lot of options to consider when modernising your firm, and choosing the right mix of approaches will be a process. Hopefully this overview has given you some things to think about. Our business is building you tools to improve your business, so reach out if you have any questions.