Introduction
Increasing your prices is never very popular with clients and you may even risk losing a small percentage of your client base. If you are a accountant, deciding what to charge for auto enrolment services can be a daunting task. Your client will want to know what they are getting in return for the additional fee, therefore, communication will be fundamental to your success. If you do get your pricing strategy right, your clients will thank you for taking the automatic enrolment duties off their hands.
Take time to clarify your new pricing structure, detail the date which it will happen and explain how it will affect your clients for the better. In this blog we will examine various strategies and tips for communicating the price rise to clients in a way that maximizes their understanding and acceptance.
Customer Feedback – Customers will be loyal to you if you engage with them on a personal level and ask for their feedback. On a one to one level you should seek advice from your best customers and explain that your business is adopting to the new auto enrolment obligations. Make it clear that you need to cater to their needs and handle these new tasks will still being fair to your clients. If you have actively sought their input clients are less likely to complain.
Value Proposition – If you take the opportunity to inform clients about the added value they will receive they are more likely to remember and understand your service offering. It will be important to also explain the value proposition to your staff. They will be on the front line dealing with queries and questions about the price hike. Make every effort to be positive by reassuring your clients that they will get the best quality service.
Communication – By explaining your price increase and outlining the benefits for your client accountants will naturally be more successful. A good idea would be to send clients a pre-assessment overview or report in advance which details each employees pensionable pay, assessment work category, employee and employer contributions.
Charging Hourly? – It would be an idea to avoid charging by the hour. If you are using software tools that allow you to automate and streamline AE tasks, it is inevitable that you will become more efficient processing AE each time you deal with a client’s staging date. If you choose to charge by the hour, you will naturally work less efficiently compared with charging per job.
Cover Costs – Accountant’s need to shop around for payroll software that has free automation auto enrolment functionality. Good payroll tools will include AE for free and automate employee assessment, communications/letters, handle opt-in and opt requests, automate postponement & postponement letter, batch process multiple tasks, include a pay slip facility, offer direct integration with leading pension providers. Ensure that your pricing structure is higher than the cost of your operational costs.
Automate & Streamline – Technology has allowed accountants to seamlessly process RTI and now technological advancements are doing the same for automatic enrolment tasks. Automating AE tasks provides a massive competitive advantage for accountants in today’s payroll world. The faster you process each client through AE, the more you will increase productivity and revenue. Automating the AE tasks reduces processing time, increases accuracy and reduces human error.
Cross Selling Opportunity – If you are a company that offers other services such as tax returns, bookkeeping, audits, tax planning, HR services, etc you have an opportunity to cross sell these services. By offering a related service as an up sell or cross sell, it can become part of your strategic growth plan as employers will want to consolidate all of their out-sourced services to one person. This a great way of increasing revenue from the same number of clients.
Just do it!! – Nike’s motto speaks for itself. Get out there and make sure your clients know you are providing AE as a chargeable service. Your clients will be surprised if you don’t increase your charges especially with the additional set up time initially required. There is a possibility that you may lose clients but they are more than likely the clients who take up more time than they are worth. If you are still reluctant to increase your prices, you could decide to only increase your charges for new clients. Try testing it on one or two clients to find out what the potential sales barriers could be.
To wrap up
There are many key factors to consider in order to take full advantage of this unique opportunities. You won’t get too many opportunities where your client actually needs help and you can justify charging for it. Don’t forget to let your clients know well in advance that you are increasing your prices and explain the factors around why you are doing this. Your customers will take the news a lot more graciously compared with suddenly springing it on them.
For more information, please do not hesitate to contact Brightpay on 0845 300 4304.
