Ignite Spot used to hear from its happiest and unhappiest clients. Now it hears from everyone in the middle.
How an 18-year-old outsourced accounting firm brought every client conversation into one place, caught a risk with one of its largest clients, and got its team to see Ping as help instead of oversight.
- The firm
- An outsourced accounting firm founded in Salt Lake City 18 years ago, serving clients across the United States
- What they offer
- Bookkeeping, AP and AR, controller, and fractional CFO and COO services for businesses with roughly $1M to $5M in revenue
- With Ping
- Closer to a year, with every person at the firm using it daily
“I would describe Ping as the central hub for all client communication.”
Before Ping
“Before we started using Ping, everything was very disjointed.”
Each client had a Google group for email. Day-to-day back and forth happened in Slack. Some work lived in Double, some in email, some in Slack. There was no single place to see a client.
“Most people were just trying to show up to the same calls just to be able to extract information from it.”
A survey hears from the edges. Ping hears from everyone.
Dan had two problems he wanted solved.
No read on most clients
Every firm sends an NPS survey. The happiest clients answer and the unhappiest clients answer. Everyone in between stays quiet.
Nobody can be in every meeting
The team needed a way to get context from a call without scheduling another meeting to hear about it.
“There’s about 75% of everybody in the middle, if not more, who you never get context from.”
Ignite Spot had tried note takers and aggregation tools before. None of them brought it together in one clean place.
One place for every client conversation, built up one system at a time.
Where they started
- Zoom
- Gmail
What they added over the year
- Double, to push tasks back and forth
- Anchor, to see contracts and how each service is performing
- A Slack channel for every client
“It seems to be always adding one extra thing that we sometimes didn’t realize that we already had.”
Every day, starting with the Cs, Ds and Fs.
Dan is in Ping every day. He checks each client’s scorecard to see whether the relationship has changed for better or worse, and starts with the clients graded C, D or F, because those are the fires. He also watches for clients the firm has not talked to in more than two weeks.
Before he works on a client project, he reads the client in Ping first.
“I don’t have to have again 10 more hours of conversation just to try to get updated on what the client wants or needs.”
One of its largest clients, kept through an ownership change
A client was sold to a new owner and stayed with Ignite Spot. The team on the regular calls felt good about the relationship. Ping saw something else: the new owner was looking for clarity and validation on parts of a business he had just bought.
That was the flag to slow down and level set. The firm made sure the new owner understood what it was doing and why. Since then, the client’s leadership has told Ignite Spot how critical it has been to the business.
“We probably would have been replaced very, very quickly, which does happen often when there’s a leadership change at an organization.”
Seeing what is going well, too
Dan uses the same view to find what is working, whether it is a person, a client, a system or a workflow, so the firm can repeat it elsewhere.
“Sometimes we don’t know when we’re just killing it.”
Is it Big Brother? Ignite Spot decided it isn’t.
The team was nervous at first. They worried it meant someone watching every move. They found out quickly that it gave them visibility into their own clients, and saved them from chasing down what happened on someone else’s call.
“It was about, now I can actually get information from someone else’s call without having to schedule 17 other meetings.”
Leadership made a choice about how to use what Ping shows. It is never used to tell someone what they did wrong. It is used to ask where the firm can help.
“Our customers are people. They’re humans and we’re humans. And in order to be able to understand what humans want, we have to recognize emotion, we have to recognize conversations in context.”
Adoption went up because of that choice. The team sees Ping as a resource for themselves, not a threat.
Everyone at the firm lives in Ping.
Every person at Ignite Spot uses Ping every day. Every meeting is recorded, from the first sales conversation to a quick question from a client. The team uses it to prepare for calls and to follow up after them, so the client always knows what is happening.
“It’s become a critical resource for us in our firm and it’s not something that I feel like we’re going to be changing in a very, very long time.”
Ignite Spot’s advice to another firm.
Most firms come to Ping for one thing: the note taker, the revenue finder or the client profile. Dan’s advice is to look at everything else too. The client scorecard was not fully built when Ignite Spot started, and it became the main thing he looks at as a firm leader.
“All of that communication, if you can get it all to come into one spot, it’s only going to create more transparency in how to support your clients and your staff more effectively.”