One thing we are sure of at Online Practice is that we know our market. We work mainly with professional practices – accountants, solicitors, IFAs and others. We chose this market as I’m a trained accountant and understand the pressures faced by the modern day firm. I’d urge any of my clients to spend time looking at the profile of their own.

Case study: We work with a firm of accountants who have a huge number of overseas clients and workers on their books. It goes without saying that it’s really important that should be available to speak with them at more unusual times of the day but surprisingly that they hadn’t factored this in when recruiting or setting office hours. After a few years of the inflexibility shining through (and several lost clients later) they started to operate an early start/late finish team rota so they were much more accessible – simple!

With tax returns on the horizon, we know that our accountant clients have time for little else, particularly during January so we slow down our communications and wait patiently for their attention to return to us in February. We factored this knowledge in when we developed docSAFE, our client portal, so accountants can save lots of time by implementing online signatures. We included clever little reports so they can see who hasn’t signed, what stage each client is at and have the ability to trigger reminders automatically. This saves them lots of time and hassle. However we only know this by talking to clients and having spent time in the sector.

What could you do to better understand your clients?