What issues are keeping CCH clients up at night?
A lot of the same issues that are keeping other CPAs up, really — the economy, the cloud, the mobile movement, increasing complexity, the accelerating rate of change, social media.
Things are changing pretty fast these days, and CCH — a 100-year-old provider of tax-, accounting- and audit-related information, software and services — will need to move just as fast if it wants to stay relevant to its clients.
Karen Abramson understands this.
Abramson took the reins as CCH’s president and CEO in September, and she is already molding the century-old company into a more responsive partner for its clients. Given the rate of change today, CCH’s survival — like that of any company out there — depends on it.
“What I really hope to do is make us a little more nimble and a little bit faster,” Abramson told me during an interview at the 2012 CCH User Conference — her first interview since taking the helm at CCH. “The rate of technological change and the rate at which everyone is expecting us to react to it is so much faster than it’s ever been before. We’re a company that’s 100 years old, and we need to adapt to be fast, to be nimble, to act like a company that’s only a year old, that’s hungry and wants to get out there and move really fast. I think we do a very, very good job of that when we understand what our customers need. I think we need to be faster in delivering (solutions) so our customers have them almost as soon as they need them.”
Watch Abramson’s interview in its entirety. Even if you’re not a CCH customer, you’ll find some refreshing insights into what a future-focused, customer-focused company looks like in an era of change and complexity.