Client Retention Strategies: Building Trust & Preventing Attrition Using Professional Habits and Effective Communication

Owning a tax preparation business can be rewarding and lucrative, but it can also be challenging to establish yourself as a reputable tax preparation office in your area. After working hard to become the expert tax preparer that you now are, it’s time to ensure that your professional habits are just as well-defined as your subject matter knowledge! Let’s talk about some of the most important mannerisms and habits exhibited by well-respected, established tax preparation business owners.

Being highly responsive is one of the best ways to convert newly-found prospects into long term clients. They call. You answer. They email. You reply. They send a text. You return a text. It may seem simple enough when you are a small, single-owner tax business with fewer than 100 clients, but as your client base grows so will the time requirements for adequate communication. One way to ensure adequate ongoing communication is by setting appropriate expectations. A new client may have successfully converted because you allowed them to contact you at will, but now it’s time to fall back on the trust that you have built with them by ensuring that you will reply as soon as you are able. Perhaps you have it in your paperwork to allow up to 48 hours for a reply. Or perhaps you only reply to messages at the end of the day. Continuing to be highly responsive, while limiting your open availability, will help you to prevent client attrition by maintaining lines of communication with your clients.  

Another way to build trust for new-to-tax pros is being confident when being honest with your clients. You cannot build trust without honesty. Most people don’t view inaccurate (even intentionally inaccurate) tax filings as breaking the law, but it is. It’s breaking tax law, and signing tax documents attesting to the truth of the claims is done under penalty of perjury. If you have a client telling you things that sound inaccurate or outside of what you personally know to be true, it is your due diligence to ask more probing questions. For example, let’s say a teenager comes in to file their taxes but they want to claim another teenage dependent for earned income credit. Right off the bat we have more questions to ask to ascertain the truth of the situation. Similarly, we have due diligence requirements for businesses. For any situation where the substantiation doesn’t match the words of the business or individual, it is upon the preparer to ask probing questions and inform and educate the client on the correct way to go about a given situation. Understand where your professional limitations are when it comes to subject matter, and if you don’t feel comfortable or confident in your ability to prepare a complex return outside of your specialty, there is no shame in asking for assistance or referring the taxpayer to another tax professional who regularly preforms such work. 

Being meticulous about your work is one more way to build trust. Double checking or even triple checking your tax work will save you time and embarrassing moments if a typo or error is discovered. Your professional tax software will likely do most of the tax calculations, but ensuring the accuracy of those figures is your duty as a professional tax preparer and tax business owner. Everyone makes mistakes, but you will save face if you catch and fix the mistake before your client sees it. You don’t have to be perfect to produce accurate and correct tax returns each time for your clients!

Following through on your tax work after tax preparation is one of the best ways to keep your clients’ trust and reduce the chances of them deciding to find another tax preparer. Was the return accepted? If not, why not? We were meticulous in the tax preparation phase, and we can’t drop the ball now! After you e-file the return, be sure to follow up on the filing and ensure that all applicable returns were officially accepted by the IRS and any relevant state tax departments. It is advisable to keep a copy of the acceptance acknowledgement in the clients’ file for posterity. If a client filed an extension, don’t wait on them to initiate their filing before the tax filing deadline. Be sure you are following up on all unresolved business. No client wants to feel like they are falling through the cracks, so to speak, when they are relying on a professional tax preparer such as you to help keep them in line.

Simply put, stay in touch with your clients, and nurture the business relationship as a long term relationship built on mutual trust. There are communication tools that make staying in touch with your client base easier than ever. By leveling-up your professional behavior and leveraging technology, you can build trust and create efficiencies inside your office that will produce a better experience for each client, each interaction leading to increased rates of long term clientele.