3 tips to make the most of your client engagement letters (and how to completely automate the process)

When was the last time you stepped back and looked at how your practice proposes to or re-engages with new and current clients? What documents are your team generating, how long does it take, and, seeing as you have your client’s attention – is there anything else you should be asking them?  

Instead of simply sending your terms and conditions each year, here are three tips to turbocharge your client proposals, and engagement/re-engagement letters: 

1. Collect information / Cross check your existing data: Bank accounts, addresses, even preferred contact numbers and email addresses – even as trusted advisors we’re sometimes the last ones to know about important changes that can impact how you interact with and manage your client’s affairs. Building in standard checklists that request and/or cross check existing data into your engagement and reengagement material can be a great way to maintain and manage the integrity of your client data (which as we all know opens up a lot of opportunities to rely on that data and use it to automate processes and interact with our clients effectively and efficiently).  
2. Update or remind your clients which of their entities you act for: While you might engage a family group to provide services for a particular set of entities, it’s not uncommon for new entities to be added or created as client’s families and business grow and change. It’s important you use your annual reengagement process to remind your clients of the scope of your services – it will remove any pricing surprises for both the client, and the practice. If it’s an active group, leave space for them to let you know about their latest investment or new start up idea so you can adjust your scope accordingly! 
3. Let them know how else you can help them: While you might think your clients are happy with the services you already provide and aren’t interested in being “sold” anything else – the chances are there are a host of other ways you can help them to achieve their goals that they have no idea of. Use your engagement letter to summarise the services you have offered to them, but also make mention of the other ways you can help them. Better yet – package up different services into tiers and give them the choice. Research suggests keeping options in odd numbers and nesting your ideal package / service combination in the middle can be a successful way to upsell services your clients might not know about.  

These are great additions to strengthen your relationships and take advantage of your client’s attention while you have it, but how do you generate such documents efficiently, and consistently across your entire practice?  

If you’re a client manager you’re probably reading this thinking how much time you already spend laboring over standard templates – adding or removing various sections, updating pricing tables, not to mention reformatting the entire document to make it look professional. 

Thankfully, client engagement documents are the perfect candidates for automation – as you frequently use the same or similar information and data across your client base. 

FuseDocs can completely automate the preparation and generation of your proposal, engagement, and reengagement packages. Leveraging the client data you already store within your practice management and document management systems, FuseDocs allows you to create a standard workflow that you can use to generate complex letters, questionnaires, checklists, and documents completed with personalised client information (no rekeying or copying addresses).  

We recently worked with a client to automate their fee proposal generation. We helped the client to identify a standard set of paragraphs and service offerings they wanted to include in their proposal. With FuseDocs connected to their practice management platform, the client manager simply needs to tick the applicable services, enter a fee estimate (or even have that information pulled directly from a custom attribute in your database) and click create proposal for a professional, branded proposal to be generated within seconds: no formatting or editing pricing tables required, and generated documents have signatures and letterhead applied automatically.  

Documents can then be filed directly into their document management platform in the click of a button or marked up with comments for reviewing.  

Of course, FuseDocs can be used to automate a host of repetitive processes – saving your team hundreds of hours generating standardised documents, eliminating double handling and data entry errors, and standardising the look and feel of your documents across your practice.  

Here are a few other examples of the processes that you can (and should be!) automating to free your team up to focus on what matters: 

• Annual client reengagement letters 
• Annual client ‘information needed’ checklists 
• Annual Family Group and Superannuation Collations, including generating and personalising standardised documents such as: 
  • Job Completion Covering Letter 
  • Accounting & Tax Engagement Letter 
  • Audit Representation Letter 
  • Various other Audit letters 
• Company Incorporations or annual ASIC Document Packages  

If this has you thinking what your automated engagement or reengagement process could look like, register for an online demo and we can explore how FuseDocs could help your practice. Visit www.fuse.work/fusedocs to register and find out more.