The client consultant relationship is the bedrock of every successful consulting firm. Firms can ensure client satisfaction by automating their intake process, billing with transparency, and capturing and tracking client commitments. Using a purpose-built consulting solution — like Intapp — brings all three of these elements into play quickly and efficiently, eliminating laborious manual processes. Strong client processes lead to enhanced client relationships that result in higher levels of recurring client business.
Streamline the Onboarding Process
Strong first impressions lead to strong client consultant relationships, which in turn generate a steady pipeline of future recurring business. The best time to make a positive impression on your new clients is at the beginning of the client consultant relationship during the onboarding process. Firms are beginning to move pieces of their onboarding process — especially intake of client data and client commitments — further upstream during their marketing and business development processes, when entering prospect information into the firm’s CRM. This allows the firm to leverage this information during downstream processes such as conflicts checking and clearance, and client or engagement acceptance.
Software like Intapp Conflicts helps firms streamline onboarding, providing an automated method that supports a robust intake and acceptance process. During this early phase of the client consultant relationship, the firm ensures that the client’s business and values align with the consulting firm’s own values and strategy. The consulting solution runs configurable monitoring metrics in the background, allowing continuous monitoring of the relationship and automatic notifications or workflows kickoffs when specific firm-defined levels are achieved. This automated process lets firms seamlessly monitor client and engagement risk profiles throughout the engagement lifecycle, taking appropriate action when required.
Centralize Client and Consultant Collaboration
Oftentimes, clients provide consulting firms with a list of commitments they need to abide by during the life of the engagement. These client commitments frequently specify requirements around how the firm bills the client.
With the Intapp Operations & Finance consulting solution, firms can capture all of the required guidelines and commitments, whether having to do with time and resource management, billing, or any other specified needs. This functionality helps firms feel secure in knowing that the Intapp system is checking its billing and time-capture processes against the client commitments and flagging any potential violations at the point of time entry — before non-compliant bill gets submitted to the client.
Intapp consulting solutions help firms create the strongest possible client consultant relationships by streamlining quick onboarding and acceptance processes, increasing billing speed and accuracy, and ensuring compliance with client terms. Consulting firms can upgrade the client consultant relationship and secure more recurring business by helping keep their clients successful, satisfied, and eager to grow the relationship.
Schedule a demo to learn how Intapp for Consulting can help your firm drive better outcomes for clients and win more business.