Conquering Workflows & Systems For Bookkeepers & Accountants | with Alyssa Lang (Workflow Queen)

How to Streamline Client Communication and Save Hours Every Week

• Alyssa Lang • Season 1 • Episode 109

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In this solo episode, Alyssa Lang covers the art of streamlining client communication to enhance productivity and client satisfaction. Alyssa shares actionable steps such as choosing the right tools, automating follow-ups, and utilizing templates for consistent communication, ensuring your interactions are seamless and stress-free!

In this episode you’ll hear:

  • How to create templates for repetitive emails and client FAQs
  • What steps can streamline client communication and improve experiences for both team and clients
  • How defining clear communication channels with clients reduces confusion and improves efficiency
  • Why automated follow-ups and check-ins with tools can prevent delays and improve your clients experience

Resources mentioned in this episode:

⚙️ Notion

⚙️ Content Snare

⚙️ Missive

⚙️ Xenett

⚙️ Keeper

💻 Effortless Client Requests for Bookkeepers & Accountants

💻 The Motherload of Email & Form Swipe File

🙋🏼‍♀️ Check out our courses and resources

Thanks for listening. If this episode inspired you in some way, take a screenshot of you listening on your device and post it to your Instagram stories and tag me, @workflowqueen

For more information about the Conquering Workflows & Systems for Bookkeepers & Accountants Podcast or interest in our programs or mentoring visit our resources below:

Visit our website: workflowqueen.com

Check out our courses: workflowqueen.com/courses

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Connect on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/alyssa-lang-wq

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Hey everyone and welcome back to the podcast. If you've ever felt like client communication is taking over your life, whether it's answering the same questions over and over again, following up for missing documents or just constantly chasing your clients down, you are not alone, my friend. Here's the thing. Communication is one of the biggest time sucks in most firms, but done right. It can actually be one of the biggest game changers for making your firm run smoothly, keeping your clients happy, and most importantly, freeing up your time. In today's episode, I'm breaking down the best tools to streamline client communication so you're not stuck in endless email threads, how to actually automate follow ups and check ins so you don't have to chase clients down manually, the power of using templates for FAQs so you're not really rewriting the same email 50 times. And if you're ready to take client communication to the next level, then this episode is for you. I can't wait. Let's go ahead and dive in. My early days of like the struggles with client communication are just. Wild. I still can't believe that at one point in my, like, journey in entrepreneurship that I was literally sending emails, different ones in different variations for the same thing that was constantly being done every single month and just rewriting it every single day. So I'd be, like, rewriting the same month end email, like, here's your reports, or I'd be rewriting the same email of, like, hey, let's book our call. Like, I'd be rewriting the email of, like, here's your onboarding checklist. I feel like I just wasted so much of my time. Of rewriting these things and I didn't really realize at the time that we can actually template these things, which still making it feel real, making it feel like I am writing it on the spot and there are ways to do that, which we're going to talk about in today's episode. And honestly, there was another big thing for me too that was a massive bottleneck was trying to track down clients for information or having to manually remind myself to send reminder emails or just dealing with the back and forth. It was just a lot, a lot of early day struggles. We still deal with our own version of like struggles as far as client communication, but we're constantly trying to find new ways that we can improve it, template it, automate it, use a new tool for it. There's so many different things. A big shift happened for me when I realized, because I used to do time tracking all the time. I still do time tracking. I don't know why I said used to. I do time tracking all the time. And with our time tracking, We're able to see how much time our team is actually spending and even myself on particular things in the business and one thing that we saw was a lot of email time. This is why time tracking is so important guys is it can tell you a lot of different things that maybe you're not seeing. We actually found that we were spending a lot of time in email with actually responding when we could have just maybe created a template email that we could copy paste. So the reason we shifted into you. Finding more automation features and softwares and templates and things that we can use to make this communication more seamless. So it really transformed the firm when we started to lean into this. It really reduced our stress, created a smoother client experience, just made life so much easier for me and the team. We also use our own form of this here at Workflow Queen as well. So I'll give you a great example. Every time, like, we have a breakthrough student who books this particular call with me, we have, like, a templated email that says, like, Hey, here's your recording. Thank you for so much for showing up. Our call was on this date. And it is warm. It's still welcoming. It's just, like, why would we rewrite that every single time? And also, when you rewrite something every time, you might accidentally forget something that you should have said in your email. And so I get it. I have been there, guys. But it's something that we really put a lot of work into over the past couple of years. And it's just completely transformed all my businesses, to be honest. So why does streamlining your client communication actually matter? So at the end of the day, poor communication equals delays, frustration, and inefficiency, not just for you, but for your client. If you are not on top of communicating with your client. They're going to have a bad experience. Therefore, they're going to tell everyone that they know, and therefore they will not work with you. At the end of the day, a client can only tolerate this so much if you're not having open communication loops with them and being really clear. But there are ways to do this without feeling bogged down. When communication is clear, automated and structure, it will actually lead you guys to less frustration for you and your team. Clients will actually feel more supported. Faster turnaround times and fewer bottlenecks when you're actually getting information from clients and a professional and seamless client experience, which as if you guys have been listening for quite some time on this podcast, you know that the client experience system is my number one favorite system in my business. So huge for me. And this is why this is something that we've been really focused on. So let's talk about some actionable steps that you can actually implement to help you to streamline client communication. So we're going to cover here three different steps today. Step one is choosing the right tools for efficient client communication. Step two is automating follow ups and check ins. Step three is using templates for FAQs and standard replies that you're constantly always sending to people. So step number one is choosing the right tools for efficient communication. So at the end of the day, you have to define within your team and with your clients as well. How are you going to communicate with clients? It is very confusing for them if you're like, you know, messaging them on Instagram, but also here on Facebook. But then you're also emailing them, but you're also calling them, but then you also want to do a zoom call. It is so exhausting a lot of the times. And I've been in a position before where I've worked with a company where it's like, wait, I'm so confused. Am I voxing you? Or am I going over here? Like, is it slack? Like, I'm so confused. And it gets really overwhelming, right? So we have to set the tone with our clients and say, this is how we define client communication. I'll give you a really great example, guys. We land a lot of our clients for Instagram for my firm. And so because of that, we do have a lot of open conversations and DMs on Instagram. Then we might get on a consult call with a client. And so once they onboard and they start the onboarding process, we make it very clear to them that you probably interacted with us on Instagram. That's probably how you originally found us. And while we absolutely love that, we want to make it super clear. that to get the best service possible, please make sure that you always communicate only via email to support at magnetic profits. com. That's literally what we say to them and just say like, you can always come over to Instagram to say, Hey, and stuff. But if you have a specific support issue or a specific. thing about what you're working on or what you need support with or report that you need, please do not Instagram DM us. So like, we're very clear about that. So for us, we actually communicate with our clients via email. And so whatever email system that they want to use, if you use something like a client portal, Like Keeper or if you use something like Xenex, like you can always say like to your clients, Hey, I know that you're getting our emails right now for onboarding, but once we get into your client or portal, that is where you're going to communicate with us about. The other thing too is making it really clear for clients that like, here's our support emails. So like if you ever have any questions about your direct support, this is where you're going to communicate with your account manager. We have a triage system cause that's what we do. We have a triage system. We share one email inbox, but we have a triage system to make sure that the emails are going to the right team members. So the right account manager, the right bookkeeper, the right cleanup specialist. We like make that very, very clear to them. And then we'll also usually provide them with like a separate email that says, and this email right here. is an email that you can reach out if you have any issues or complaints about the company that you want to bring higher up to management. So it's like a separate email. And that's something that usually will go directly to me as of right now, but it's something that will change on the team pretty soon here. But that's something that you can do. You just have to make it really clear with them. If a client accidentally emails me directly, then I'll just like, You know, nudge them to be like, Hey, this is actually a support question. Please make sure to forward these all to support. The only time you'd ever email me is if in the case that there is an issue with maybe an account manager, they don't want to email or support, you know, email stuff like that. So if you have a portal, just make sure to define what that looks like. And then guys, please, if you are using a portal, it is cool that you're using a portal. And I absolutely love this for you. We don't use a client portal just because like. Our clients don't need another place to log in. But if you do use a client portal, guys, you've got to train people on how to use your portal. I know that you're in it every single day. If you're in your Keeper every day, you're in your Zenix every day. That's cool, but at the end of the day, the clients don't understand how to use it. So you need to maybe send them a Loom video of like, this is how you navigate the portal. This is how you do a response. So on and so forth. So we're talking about like communication as far as, Let's just say someone's booking a console call. There's a lot of these scheduling softwares out there that will actually automate the, like, back and forth emails to remind them to don't forget to attend this call. So for example, we use Calendly on our team. That's something that we've been using for years. I get this question all the time where people are like, Don't you use Dubsado? Why wouldn't you just use Acuity? I don't like Acuity's scheduler. I actually really prefer Calendly. And that's just a preference thing. So at the day you just choose what feels good for you. But the reason we love Calendly is that when someone books the call, we have it set up that it automatically reminds them to attend the call. And at the end of the day, guys, I can't tell you how frustrating it is. I'm, I get so frustrated when people don't show up to consult calls or consult calls or calls in general. I just think it's rude if you don't like let someone know that you can't make it because at the end of the day, there's no excuses anymore. There's now like three or four different reminder emails for someone to show up, so. Trust me, it's all good. But this is a good way for you to be able to, like, have it automated. You don't have to worry about it. So, now as far as client check ins, chat, support, all that stuff, just be very clear with your clients. Where are they actually going to communicate with you from? Like I said, for us it's support at magneticprofits. com, so that's where we usually will push our clients to communicate. Now as far as, Communication, when we're defining these with the clients, we're usually telling these things on the onboarding, letting them know that you can always send us an email if you ever need anything. You will, like for us, we use Content Snare. Content Snare is like one of my favorite things for collecting documents and information from clients on like our monthly requests. We also use it for our onboarding. We also use it for our cleanups. We use it for in a lot of different ways. And so the reason I'm bringing this up is with content snare, we're very clear to them that while you can email us throughout the month, we will be sending you like a monthly request. It's gonna be through this software called Content Snare. Don't worry, you do not need to log in. We are gonna send this to you. It's just how we collect information and documents. You can actually hit comment inside of that exact, requesting feature, so that way it makes it really easy for you guys to comment back and forth on us without having to like go outside of that request form to email us, within that request. It streamlines, our clients love content there, it makes it really, really easy. And so at the end of the day, just choose your email management, so how are you going to communicate with your clients? How are you going to, you know, set up your automated, like, consulting calls, like, any things like that? So that way you can use maybe a scheduler. And then at the end of the day, how are you going to actually request information from the clients? Is that through a portal, something like Content Snare? If you are interested in using something like Content Snare, I did partner with Brooke Swan, one of my absolute favorite humans in the industry. We actually created a Content Snare course, so we actually give you guys our exact Content Snare template. So everything that you need for onboarding, all the requests, everything that you need, all the automated emails for this. And if you want to check out our program Effortless Client Requests, you can go to workflowqueen. com backslash content snare. And I'll also drop that link in the show notes for you guys as well if that's something that you're interested in. We actually show you the whole entire content snare, how to set it up, how to use it, and all the fun things. But the pro tip here on step one for choosing the right tools for efficient client communication is to at the end of the day, guys, whatever tool you use, just make sure it's so simple for your clients to use. This is one of the big reasons why I do not have a client portal for our clients because we got feedback from our clients. Guys, what you think your clients like might not be what they actually like. And so surveying your clients is so important. So when we surveyed our clients, we were like, do you guys even want a client portal? Another place that you log in? They were like, absolutely not. I'm way too busy. I don't need to do that. So that's why we decided not to have a client portal, but we still use. Xenex for our quality control process, but we just don't use it in the client portal. Because we want to make it really easy for our clients because if not, we're not going to get what we need. Right? So step number two is automating follow ups and check ins. So this is really, really big because clients will often forget the deadlines. And so automation actually helps you guyseliminate chasing them down d so there's a several different things that we actually use for something like this. A really great example of this is when I was just talking about Content Snare. So with Content Snare, the reason I absolutely love Content Snare and why it stands out to any other software is within Content Snare. We can like, I'll just give you an example. When we're onboarding a brand new client, we can actually send them a content snare request, which essentially will ask them things like, you know, what entity type are you, please upload your tax return. You can like upload things, you can respond to things, you know, what payroll provider do you use? What bank account do you have? We're asking them so many questions during onboarding. And so essentially what we do inside of content snare, we can actually send the onboarding requests and we actually have a backend automated email sequence that will literally follow up. So we give the client a deadline. So we give them a deadline of like two weeks, let's just say for the onboarding and within that two week period, it will send automated emails that are different. So they'll say things like. Hey, welcome to onboarding. We're super excited to be welcoming you into the Magnetic Profits family. Like before we move forward, we need some information from you. It's very crucial that you get this within the next 14 days. If you do not, it will delay your onboarding and we will have to put you behind the back of the line from other clients that are actually getting us what we need. And if you have any questions, let us know. And then like maybe if they haven't responded to that request and started getting us what we need. Maybe three days later, it'll be like, Hey, we noticed that you haven't started your onboarding form. It is very important that you get this started, blah, blah, blah. Then let's just say it's been like a week and they still have not gotten us what we need. Or maybe they gave us half of what we need inside of content Sarah. It will automate it based off the actions the clients are taking. So if the clients only filled out 50 percent of it, it will literally email them based off the automation that we set in place that says, Hey, we noticed that you filled out half your onboarding. Do you need some help? Are you maybe getting stuck? So you can see how like we can have like an automation that literally customizes the way that we speak to our clients. You can not get this in any other software guys. I'm telling you, I have researched all of them. Things like Keeper and Xenex, they do have client portals and yes you can request things. But you guys are going to send the same freaking generic email every single week to the client. asking for the same thing in the same verbiage in the same language, we can customize that because like we need to tell our clients the urgency at which why onboarding so quickly is so important. And so this is something to kind of think about and like I said we've been using Content Snare for years and so if you want to see my whole entire setup and if you want to like import it easily into your Content Snare. Check out that program I was mentioning early with Brooke Swan. It's called Effortless Client Requests. You can also find it on our Workflow Queen website as well because we give you everything, guys. Other tools that you can be using in conjunction of follow ups and check ins with your clients are things like Zapier and Gmail. So if you want to do more manual, in my opinion, that even though it's automated, it still feels manual. That's why we have Content Snare because like we used to do this. So we used to send automated Gmail emails with Zapier and that just got really complicated. We have to manually set them up every single month. It just became chaos. So at the end of the day, we were like, Nope, content's there way easier. One click done. It's like sending everything off and it's automated and then we can reuse that same automation for every client that kind of comes in, right? And so when it comes to these follow ups and check ins, we also want to make sure that like, for example, So, I think about three months into a client working with us, we have an automated email, which is, this is not necessary for content saver, we actually do have an automated email that we use Zapier with, that essentially will send The client an email that will say, Hey, it's been three months since you started working with us. We would love your feedback. Please like fill out this survey here and let us know how you feel about working with us. So on and so forth. So these little tiny things guys are just allowing us the opportunity to step back and not have to worry about doing these things for them as well. When you're doing follow ups as well guys, you can use a lot of different softwares. Like we use Loom. for communication with our clients. Sometimes if we're trying to show them something on screen, it's not necessarily automated, but it allows for us to give a more personal touch and more engaging. We also use Loom at the very beginning when we're onboarding a client to do like an introduction video of like, Hey, like I'm the founder here, Alyssa Lang here at Magnetic Profits. I am so honored and blessed that you chose us to partner with you and your financial journey. And if you have any questions, this is what to expect, blah, blah, blah. So we use that. And then we send that to the clients. That way they have. Like a breakdown and a visual of like who I am as a leader and that I also am verbalizing that you are going to be working with an onboarding specialist, you're also going to be working with your own dedicated bookkeeper and account manager. So we kind of communicate that. My recommendation too is if you can set up email automations, like you can even use this like beyond just like current clients guys, this could be used in like the marketing funnels, but that's a whole nother episode for a whole nother day. But you want to make sure you have an easy way because in the past what I used to do is I used to have a task inside of Asana that would tell me to send an email to a client to remind them to get us what we're still missing from them and that's what we replaced content snare with. The whole thing here, guys, is usually you don't start implementing other softwares or new processes or change things until the headache of what you're currently doing is so strong you can no longer tolerate it. And so at one point, I used to do these things very manually, until it became to a point where it was such a headache, such a big bottleneck, got in our way, wasted a lot of our time when we were looking at the data and time tracking, that we finally implemented something that actually made it a lot faster and easier. So something that you might want to, you know, think through as far as automation. If you want to share any cool things that you guys have done with automating follow ups and check ins with your clients, please let me know. You can either email us at support at workflow queen dot com. You guys, those emails do eventually get to me if you guys share with me that it's in regards to this podcast episode. Or come on Instagram at workflow queen and share with me some of the automated things that you guys are doing. I love chatting automations. step for creating a better, more streamlined client communication system is using templates for FAQs, which are, frequently asked questions or standard replies or and or standard replies. So stop rewriting the same freaking email every day, guys. I get it. I have been there, done that, and it is not something I ever want for myself again. What I mean by this is like, I do have to send one off emails that like, aren't consistent that I do actually have to type out and I don't have a templated email for. However, like, let's just say for the example of if I have to send out an email to our clients that says, like, hey, here's your monthly reports, like, if you have any questions, let us know. I'm not going to retype that every month. So instead, what we do, is we actually store these inside of Notion. So this is where Notion is another tool that allows for us to like store information. We actually store the email templates inside of Notion, but however, we have now implemented something called Missive. Missive is like how we can connect our Gmail into this like more streamlined. Like email triaging system. It's something that if you have a team, I definitely would look into it. If you don't have a team, I wouldn't bother with missive because it really comes in handy when you have a team, we can actually implement templates within missive. And the cool part is when we use a specific template, we actually don't even have to copy paste it into the email. We now can just like hit, yes, I want to use that template. And it will just ask us a series of questions of like. You know, what's the client's name? What's the link to the report? And it automatically fills out that email. It's really cool. And so for us, we store the backups inside of Notion, but we actually have them listed inside of Missive. And so the reason I share this with you guys is because these are ways that we're just getting more efficient and we're automating these types of things. So we have a lot of things that are standard templated replies. And we typically will have like a list of FAQs, so Frequently Asked Questions, because even though we might not have like a dedicated email to something specific, we do have a list, and this is actually inside of Notion because this isn't something that you'd want to put as a template somewhere else. In Notion we have a database called a database. of frequently asked questions from our clients. We even have one here for Workflow Queen. So like, how do I log into my portal? Like, we literally have a standard template, so if you've ever emailed my team and said, how do I log into my portal, or how do I reset my password, or anything like that, our team literally has a database of how to reply, and that way they don't have to rewrite it every time, all the steps are there, they just copy paste it. Sometimes we tweak them when we're sending them, but FAQs really come in handy. So, A great example of this might be, um, how do I book a call with you guys? So you might want to have like a standard response. So like something that's like, oh yeah, in order to book a call with us, it's blah blah blah. Or maybe someone's, will randomly like ask you, I don't know, in like Instagram or like a DM, they'll be like, hey. do you work with a certain type of niche? Or do you work with a certain type of business? You might have a standard reply that's like, we actually only work with course creators, creatives, and coaches. Like, you might have a standard reply. So it really does come in handy because the templated emails are like, emails we will copy paste to originally send to someone while FAQs are like ways that will respond to someone, if they're typical questions that we get. So another really big thing that you can do in like FAQs, maybe it's something like maybe a client's emailing you and says, Hey, where do I find my financials? You might have just a standard FAQ response. that like is already pre templated out, that's ready to go, that your team can copy paste. And this is how we're able to get our assistant to be in our inbox and not have to have someone like me or our account managers always doing everything. Because at the end of the day, it's like the assistant can literally just copy paste something and just put the Google Drive link for the client, right? A lot of things that you guys can template too is follow up sequences for missing documents. Like I said, we just have that built into contents there, so we no longer have to manually send that. So having these templates can really save you guys. Lots of hours, things like your client onboarding emails. There's so much that you guys can do for consistency in your responses. So we actually do have a mini program. You guys can go to workflowqueen. com backslash courses. On the courses page you guys will see something that's called the Motherload of Email and Forms. I've actually had this mini offer since like 2020. Like I've had it for like 5 years guys. And if you want like my pre templated emails that are ready to go for you guys, that you guys can use in communication, feel free to pop over there and you guys can snag that. And yeah fun things. So let's talk about a couple of things before we dive into the rest of this episode here because we've covered our three steps. But I want to talk about a couple of things that might come up for you guys. One big thing that I hear a lot in the industry is, I don't have time to set this up Alyssa. I just don't. I just need to send off the email. If you don't set this up now and you don't take the time to do it, you'll just waste way more time manually handling. All of that communication later. It really truly does save us a lot of time to do this, but it's okay if you want to manually type things out. Like I said, we do not lose the personal touch by copying and pasting. We're saying the same thing that we would if we manually had said it, except now we've just templated it. It just makes our life so much easier. Another thing you might be saying is, my clients prefer personal communication. Automation guys, and I hear this all the time, automation doesn't mean it's impersonal. I actually keep things so much more fun and fluffy and exciting. And like our brand voices in there, we've got the emojis and like, it's something that we constantly. are just allowing ourselves to just be exactly who we are, but in a templated response. You do not lose that personal connection if you go with the automation route. People still reply to our emails, guys, and we have to respond to them, right? And so, like, we're still here, we're still being involved in this, it's just like we're automating a portion of it. Another thing you guys might be saying is, Will automation make me seem less accessible? And it won't, guys. It absolutely won't. It actually helps you guys to set clear expectations, and allows you to be more present. When they really need you. So instead of your clients, if you're sitting over here spending like, let's just say 10 hours a month on sending freaking emails, you could be spending 10 hours that month bettering your process for advisory to better serve your clients. Wouldn't you want that more? That is way more supportive for your clients and you sending emails and retyping them out, every single month. Right? So just something to kind of think about as you like navigate, you know, streamlining your client communication. How can we get that across to the client? Like I said, we have several different options that you guys, if you want to implement to help you guys cut this down without having to do it yourself. You can just go to workflowqueen. com backslash courses. We've got our effortless client request program and the mother load of email forms and swipe files. But that is up to you. You guys can always do this. totally yourself. You guys are way capable and all the things, but we do have resources for this guys. So let's do a quick little recap before we end off today's episode. So step number one is to use the right tools to streamline your communication, define that with your clients, communicate that with them. If you've never done that, or if you did it three years ago with your clients and you want to redefine it, I'm going to challenge you guys to send out an email and say, this is how we're now communicating. Go here, blah, blah, blah, do this. Step two is automate follow ups and client check ins to reduce the manual work. Step number three is use templates to save time and provide consistent professional responses. I'm so excited because we're going to be just diving into all the good juiciness over the next couple of episodes and just really expanding on more systems and team and just how to, better client experiences, all the fun stuff. And I can't wait for you guys to be a part of it. If you had any wind from this and you want to share it with me, come on Instagram at Workflow Queen and. Come share your wins because I love hearing what you guys are doing and what you're implementing.