Rethinking client communication in professional services

Transforming the way your business delivers its entire core market offering might be considered a bold move for most organisations. But with risk usually comes reward. And it’s this reward KPMG is focused on as the professional services firm rethinks the way it communicates with clients.

When KPMG’s Sydney team relocated to its amazing new offices at the top of the International Tower in Barangaroo earlier this year, the firm capitalised on a significant opportunity to upgrade client services, and boost employee satisfaction and productivity at the same time.

This has included, launching new digital services, opening shared innovation spaces where clients and consultants come together to tackle complex business challenges, and the provision of open plan offices, organised by industry solutions and client teams where employees of all levels sit next to one another.

KPMG is not only “talking the talk” when it comes to business transformation. The firm is “walking the walk” too.

Speaking about the role of technology in this new era of KPMG, James Hunter, National Managing Partner, Markets and Growth outlined how new applications and platforms are helping employees, and the organisation, achieve more.

A core component of KPMG’s digital transformation is the firm’s use of Microsoft Dynamics 365, which is improving communication and collaboration among the company’s 5,500 employees in Australia.

“We are growing rapidly – and in 2016 are providing a diverse range of services to over 15,000 companies in Australia.  With rapidly changing customer demands, including most senior executives seeking integrated solutions, bringing across KPMG capabilities to deliver outcomes faster than ever before, we need to operate more effectively and seamlessly.” 

“Microsoft Dynamics 365 enables KPMG meet these challenges – and provide a much stronger client experience every time we interact. The enhanced capabilities around internal collaboration and 360 degree client views are features we’ve been looking to develop for over five years, and moving from our old system to the Microsoft platform has helped deliver them,” added Hunter.

 In provisioning its services, KPMG will commonly hold relationships with a number of stakeholders in each of its clients – from a handful in growing and family businesses, up to 100+ among larger organisations.

This creates challenges in efficiently keeping track and sharing most recent updates – including lead and opportunity management, and event management – limiting KPMG’s ability to offer its full range of services to tackle the challenges at hand.

The need to address this challenge was made more pressing as KPMG encouraged employees to be more agile in their working day.

Using Microsoft Dynamics 365, KPMG now has a single view of each client contact, with a record of the latest interactions, updates, and opportunities available on any device at any time.

Employees are increasingly finding themselves empowered to deliver an improved standard of service due to the level of insight they now have.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 was selected by KPMG following a competitive tender process, where the firm called out three features which made the technology the “stand-out” selection.

Beginning with usability, KPMG needed a tool which was easy to use, and which would integrate seamlessly with its existing Microsoft stack.

Microsoft Dynamics delivered on this with the solution integrating effortlessly into Outlook, as well as being offered through a mobile application, ensuring updates and interactions could be easily and efficiently logged in near real-time.

Secondly, the professional services firm wanted a comprehensive CRM platform that required minimal customisation to allow future updates to be incorporated rapidly as they became available through Microsoft’s trusted and intelligent cloud services.

KPMG’s third and final requirement was for a CRM platform that could be deployed quickly and easily.

“Integration, ease of access, and strict security protocols around entire business records were crucial factors in our selection of Microsoft technology. The solutions deployed allow us to fulfil a real desire to offer every part of KPMG to each of our clients through a simple and secure platform. Being a large organisation with thousands of users this can sometimes be complex, but this is not the case with Microsoft Dynamics,” added Hunter.

Delivered ahead of time and on budget, KPMG’s Microsoft Dynamics deployment is driving a cultural change at the firm, and shaping new innovations being made available to clients.

“We have had a fantastic response to the rollout, only last month we had each of our 450 leaders using it on their mobile devices”