Want to Improve Customer Service? Why Capacity Planning May Be Key

The 2020s have seen massive changes to workplace policies, political sentiment and attitudes towards employers – and we’re only about halfway through the decade!  

Despite all the change, there’s one overarching trend in every industry: personalization. Business buyers today want their services tailored to their specific needs and goals. The accounting firms that achieve the most success with clients are the ones that offer them the most personalized service.

Lots of firms experiment with different initiatives to improve their customer service by tailoring it to their clients’ needs. One of the best ways to make customers happier is to engage in thorough capacity planning for your internal resources. In this article, we’ll go over the basics of capacity planning and explain its connection to improved customer service. 

What is capacity planning? 

In simple terms, capacity planning is the practice of mapping all of your firm’s internal resources to the necessary outputs.  

For a simple example, we can use employee time tracking. Let’s say you have 15 full-time employees who work 40 hours per week and 5 part-time who work 20 hours per week. That provides your firm with a total of 700 hours per week, or 2800 per month. From there, you would assign these hours to firm work or client projects. 

Ideally, you’ll want to use capacity planning for all of your resources, not just employee hours. There are a few key ways in which this process will enhance customer service: 

Giving your accounting firm staff some breathing room 

Everyone knows the stress of feeling an unmanageable workload. Over time, an excessively large work burden can lead to a number of serious physical and mental health problems.  

With effective capacity planning, this situation is much less likely to occur – and if it does happen, you’ll be aware of it right away.  

When your team members aren’t being pushed to their limits, it’s much easier for them to devote the needed time and attention to your clients. If they have enough capacity, they may even be able to go above and beyond client expectations – always a great way to ensure a high level of customer service. 

Allowing for steady growth without affecting clients 

It’s a sad yet common story in the world of accounting: a firm gets very good at sales and marketing, quickly brings in a ton of business, and grows its revenue faster than they thought possible. It seems like a great situation…until they have to actually do the project work!  

The firm finds out in a hurry that they don’t have the manpower to fulfill their client obligations, leading to a mad dash to hire enough people to get the work done on time. All the while, everyone is feeling stressed, pressured and overworked. 

With proper capacity planning, this situation can be almost completely avoided. Instead of haphazardly adding new clients to your team’s workload, you’ll be able to grow in a steady, controlled manner that doesn’t lead to mistakes or errors in client accounts.  

Consistent growth means you can adjust your workflow management in advance of a greater workload, not as a reaction to unexpected new business. 

Identifying areas where you need to improve 

If you find that there’s a specific type of client or project that consistently leads to discrepancies between capacity planning and actual resources required, it’s a sign that you may need to investigate this type of work within your firm. You might need to adjust the number of resources you plan to use for that kind of project. If you find that the capacity required for this type of work or client is consistently unpredictable, it may be best to avoid it altogether. 

Conversely, capacity planning also allows you to determine your best-fit client. These are the projects and accounts that always require fewer resources than you planned for, without sacrificing anything when it comes to project fees.  

Clients or projects that require less time or money can be a key in unlocking serious growth for your accounting firm. Typically, getting things done faster than expected will also please your clients, improving the strength of the relationship, making client collaboration easier, and increasing your client retention. 

The right approach to accounting firm capacity planning 

Now that you’re in the loop about the many benefits of capacity planning, you may be wondering how to implement the practice. If you’ve never done it before, we recommend you start small, using a few different kinds of resources applied to a select group of projects or initiatives. Once you get more comfortable with it, you can expand the scope of your capacity planning. 

Our last piece of advice is to ensure your capacity planning strategy fits within the rest of your operations, not the other way around. If you have to go out of your way and disrupt your normal business to engage in capacity planning, it won’t provide as valuable of a return.  

An excellent choice to complement this approach is accounting practice management software, which typically offers functionality across all areas of your business. When you incorporate capacity planning efficiently into your current software stack, it will not only improve customer service but make your team feel less stressed and more satisfied with their work. 

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