Organizations with a focus on client-oriented professional services come in many forms, with legal, accounting, management consulting and advertising as just a few widely varied examples.
But despite differences in the services themselves, these companies face similar hurdles, which a well-chosen provider of HR software can help overcome.
Do these challenges sound familiar?
For some organizations, the uphill battle starts with training. It isn’t enough to fill positions with highly skilled professionals. Those employees will likely also need continuing education – year in, year out – both to stay aware of industry changes and to maintain required certifications.
These trainings require exceedingly high degrees of specialization. As just one example, if you consider the various types of law that fall under the umbrella of “the legal industry,” it becomes clear that a “one-size-fits-all” approach to training simply won’t cut it.
Then there is the business of serving clients. A consistent level of service and the ability to set your organization apart from ever-hungry competitors are crucial to retaining existing clients and attracting new ones.
And let’s not forget what may be your single biggest cost: employee salaries. Cutting corners in this area may result in lower-quality services, which in turn could put client relationships in jeopardy. Yet spending more on wages means lower profit margins.
It’s all a lot to juggle. Fortunately, help is available.
How does this sound?
Software that gives employees access to their own HR-related information – like Paycom’s Employee Self-Service® (ESS) – also gives them the ability to make their own changes to that information, not to mention getting answers to their questions.
With self-service tech, there is no need for employees to waste time figuring out who exactly they need to reach in HR to get their insurance information, for example. Their own personal information will be easy to find, but if they have questions, a tool like Ask Here – which, like ESS, is available through the Paycom mobile app – will route their question to exactly the right person to answer it, so peace of mind can be delivered in no time.
Employees with more time to perform their designated roles are free to focus on providing the kind of industry-leading client service on which your organization’s success depends.
What about all those expenses accrued in lunches and other meetings with clients? In the past, retaining receipts and stapling them onto a report was a headache that could only detract from the mission of ensuring client satisfaction. But with technology like Expense Management, submitting an expense report and getting managerial approval for reimbursement is as simple as uploading a picture of a receipt via the app or sending it to the designated email address.
And speaking of managers, thanks to a tool like Manager on-the-Go®, they can handle other necessary approvals with a few clicks of a smartphone app, no matter their physical location, so service continues without a hitch on their end, too!
Meanwhile, formerly manual HR processes are automated, leading to fewer redundancies and delays all around.
The ripple effect
Now let’s drill down a little further into those industry challenges. The right HR tech doesn’t just make HR processes simpler. It also addresses the need for ongoing training. With a tool like Paycom Learning, trainings are easier to provide than ever, from a library of existing courses to video-based content-creation capability. And managers can track employee completion of required trainings with an equal degree of ease.
This has an important effect on client service and retention: When a manager or trainer has the ability to upload video training content specific to client service – of which the employee can then demonstrate mastery via video evidence – the quality of that service can only grow. If your industry deals with a high turnover rate, a premium exists on quick but effective training that only a cutting-edge platform can provide.
The same logic applies to hiring and onboarding, to give another example. With Paycom’s Applicant Tracking, open positions automatically post to top career sites and job boards. Keep all candidate information centralized in one convenient location and more, all with a seamless flow of data to your other HR tools in the same system to eliminate data re-entry!
The takeaway
We know clients are everything to organizations like yours, in part because they’re everything to us.
The reality of keeping clients satisfied is simple: The better your tech, the greater your organizational efficiency. And the greater your organizational efficiency, the better your ability to provide the services your clients need.
If this sounds like a desirable goal to you, we’re always here to help you achieve it.