Zoho for Professional Services

Building the Successful Professional Services Ecosystem

To be successful in today’s highly competitive business environment, your professional service firm need to differentiate itself from the competition. To do so, you must nurture close relationships with clients, collaborate effectively, control and manage both content and risk, and exceed clients' expectations in quality and timeliness of deliverables.

The Challenges

As pressure increases to deliver high-quality service to clients more quickly and at lower costs, professional services firms face many obstacles:

Coping with rapid content growth: Time spent searching for, sifting through, organizing, and managing information takes away from time teams could use to fine-tune advice and ensure quality of final deliverables.

Improving team collaboration: Without effective tools for collaborating across multiple departments and locations, team members are forced to spend valuable time maintaining accurate versions of documents, arranging and holding meetings, and waiting for content during lags in workflow or bottlenecks in review cycles.

Removing impediments to mobile worker productivity: Remote worker productivity is limited by firewalls and poor connectivity. Many professional services teams have adopted team sites to collaborate within the corporate firewall, but still use e-mail and the telephone to work with team members and clients outside the firewall. Real-time collaboration across firewalls via e-mail is limited by lack of version control, difficulty connecting, and the absence of accountability tracking. These limitations not only reduce individual productivity, but they also hamper team collaboration, slow down progress on deliverables, and disrupt project schedules.

Giving clients visibility into projects: Clients have little or no visibility into the status of project deliverables and tasks, which reduces client satisfaction and requires teams to spend more time reporting this information to clients.

Addressing inefficient, cumbersome reporting on projects: Internal project status reporting is often labor-intensive and time-consuming due to the lack of adequate workflow processes and the automation of routine tasks

Managing risk and compliance: Professional services-related decisions and documents are subject to a heightened risk of litigation and damaged reputation stemming from the delivery of flawed advice or noncompliance with industry regulations. New regulations have increased the risks of transferring and storing sensitive client data, increasing the need for firms to provide data assurance.

The Solution

Integrated team and client workspaces built using Zoho software can help professional services teams efficiently deliver high-quality customer service.

Integrated team workspaces provide client services teams with an intra-firm collaboration environment focused on a specific project—for example, a legal matter, an accounting or consulting engagement, or an architectural, engineering, or IT services project. The workspace portal integrates all existing firm systems for document management, billing and invoicing, and instant messaging, providing team members with a holistic view of the project, and fast, easy access to all information necessary for timely and successful completion. An integrated team workspace also enables global virtual teams to assemble around a project to better serve the client's needs.

Integrated client workspaces, or client extranets, are external-facing project portals that provide clients with secure access to shared documents. Clients see only the information they should see—what has been delivered or changed, how much has been or remains to be paid, and so on—enabling the firm and the client services team to better manage the client's experience of service. Client workspaces also enable interactive collaboration between a client services team and clients, helping teams to fine-tune projects and deliver the expertly tailored service solutions clients demand today.

By using Zoho CRM, Projects, Wiki  and People together, professional services firms can significantly enhance the quality of their client service.

The Benefits

An integrated team and client workspace solution based on Zoho business solutions can help professional services firms:

Keep both clients and team members up to date on tasks, issues, and case information
Good communication among team members, and between teams and clients, is essential to the completion of high-quality projects and to client satisfaction. With an integrated workspace solution, everyone involved in a project can stay informed and connected, helping to ensure that schedules are met, issues are addressed, and goals are achieved.

Retrieve information about cases and clients more quickly and easily
All information related to a project can be shared on a single integrated team workspace—documents, supporting cases and studies, team calendars, lists of specialists who have contributed to the project, and billing information—which means less time spent searching for client and project information.

Increase mobile worker productivity when offsite or in areas with limited connectivity
It's not only individual team members who benefit from connectivity when offsite, but entire teams as well. Real-time communication and peer-to-peer synchronization of data enable teams to move forward confidently with projects.

Share and reuse information to take advantage of the firm's intellectual capital
When teams don't have to generate new documents for each client or project, they can focus their time on responding creatively to unique client needs.