Every field within the professional services industry is very competitive and a firm’s success is highly dependent upon its human capital. Whether brokerages, consultants or agencies, and whatever field they are engaged in, professional services firms know that it is the knowledge, skills and time of their people they are selling.
As competition continues to intensify and the pace of change across the industry accelerates, professional services firms find themselves facing two key challenges: making sure staff skills and knowledge are constantly updated and, simultaneously, marketing these proficiencies to the right audiences within an increasingly fragmented and discerning marketplace.
Most professional services companies — accountancy and law firms, for example — offer a wide range of specialised products and services across many disciplines. As a result, a key challenge they face is how to communicate the right offering to the right audiences because clients are unlikely to know enough about all of them.
The solution to both challenges is eCRM.
Whether engaging with prospective clients and selling services or promoting training sessions and workshops to internal staff, professional services firms are able to use a single, integrated eCRM solution to orchestrate and maximise the effectiveness of both efforts.
eCRM is intelligent, data-driven online communication and relationship management and, as more and more professional services firms are discovering, it is the key to developing and deepening one-to-one relationships with both internal and external audiences.
eCRM helps maximise revenue
- Profile and segment potential clients to ensure that appropriate services and products are promoted to the right prospects at the right time.
- Personalise all communication and stay in regular contact with clients about subjects of specific interest via the digital channel they prefer (web, email or mobile) to grow existing relationships.
- Use client profiles to anticipate changing needs and preferences and to identify new opportunities as they arise.
- Maximise fee generation by keeping staff skills and knowledge constantly updated through regular, personalised communication regarding their individual training and skills development opportunities and requirements;
- Encourage participation and improved communication between all stakeholders, facilitating the development of one-to-one relationships both externally and internally.
eCRM helps minimise communication costs
- Automate and schedule regular client communication to reduce the administrative burden and costs associated with tasks like subject area newsletters and bulletins.
- Design and dispatch professional communication materials using extremely cost-effective digital channels (email, web and mobile).
- Minimise the strain on your communications infrastructure by scheduling the sending of high speed and high volume messages to large, diverse audiences (bulk emails or SMS) to take place at the most appropriate times.
- Reduce communication wastage and lower costs by using eCRM profiling tools to eliminate unwanted and unnecessary communications;
- Reduce administration burdens on both staff and customers by centralising the information flow and, since time is billable, every saved second counts.
How does ENSIGHT deliver these benefits?
- Multi-channel communication platform
Orchestrate consistent communication across multiple channels (web, email, mobile/SMS) and to suit target audience preferences, ensuring the right individuals are exposed to the right messages at the right time.
- Powerful profiling and personalisation mechanism
Get to know individual clients and members of staff better and use this knowledge to improve segmentations, target opportunities more accurately and engage with each of them more productively.
- Sophisticated communication workflow engine
Automate routine communication tasks to achieve efficient, cost-effective relationships, with both internal and external audiences.