CPAs are naturally in the business of serving others. As we slide into the mid-week holiday, having recently sailed past the halfway point of the year, customer service comes to mind. How did your firm, practice or company improve with customer service during the first half of the year?

Every public accounting firm or business has a list of business obstacles. Competitors, market forces, staffing, changing technology, security breaches and weather events are but a few of these challenges. What’s really the ultimate challenge for all firms and companies, though, is finding and conquering these obstacles.

In a perfect world, one problem that shouldn’t exist at any firm or company is poor customer service. Providing a high level of customer service should be first and foremost for every business out there, but that’s not the reality. If your firm or company is not excelling with customer service, these “thinking points” might be worth consideration and contemplation. There’s a whole other half of the year to go — and what a great opportunity there is to make it a remarkable six months by elevating the customer service bar.

Customer service improvement opportunities:

*Hire and retain nice people

*Empower your employees

*Underpromise and overdeliver

*Ask customers, clients and referral sources regularly for their honest feedback

*Always be thinking “how to improve”

Many readers of this blog post will be enjoying some holiday time this week. During this downtime, you may find it refreshing to let the mind wander over business improvement issues — and the potential changes that the future may hold. Well over 200 years ago, who could have foreseen where we’d be in 2018?!?

On July 4, 1776, the thirteen colonies claimed their independence from England, an event which eventually led to the creation of the United States. Have a fantastic Independence Day!

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“It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit.”
–Harry S. Truman