Digital best practice in professional services

Our latest roundtable, at Crafthouse Leeds, concluded the latest in series of successful Calls9 events for professional services. We’ve been running these events to better understand the challenges businesses face and to provide a forum in which professionals can connect with like-minded people.

This roundtable was no different and attracted a fantastic mix of attendees from various sectors, including accounting, chartered surveyors, legal, financial, training, investment and insurance. With such a diverse range of people in attendance, this led to a varied discussion around best practice in a number of areas.

“I found the openness and honesty of (it) all very refreshing — and whilst we all realise the value and benefits that great tech could bring to our business, the challenge remains in transforming human behaviour to get the most out of it!”

Digital conversations

Some of the digital topics we discussed over the morning were:

• More innovative ways to win business
• Extracting knowledge from people and sharing it
• Effectively communicating messages internally
• Changing culture to embrace digital

We opened the conversations with a simple question: Have you ever said to yourself, there has got to be a better way to do this?

Among the challenges discussed were how to change the mindset of people who are stuck in the “we have always done it this way” and struggle to embrace digital. We also looked at how to keep communication strong when a company is growing quickly and has many remote operators.

With regards to knowledge in a business there were two issues raised. 1) How to effectively share the knowledge and 2) How to channel it when there is an overabundance of information at people’s fingertips. This was all brought into context by ways to improve wellbeing using (or not using) digital.

We agreed that employees need to feel valued and have systems in place which they want to use, as well as ones that reduce, not increase stress levels. If thought out and executed well, the right systems can lead to higher productivity levels, increased staff retention rates and a competitive advantage for businesses. In addition, new employees into the workforce are looking for technology and ways of working that they are familiar with and get at home — why should the journey into work be a journey back in time?

We also looked at efficiencies using digital and how simple innovation could remove thousands from the operating costs of a business. For example, we discussed better ways of managing compliance by streamlining and how notes taken off site can be processed and remove hours of work.

This led to a further conversation on the most effective ways to innovate in a business, including using mergers and acquisitions to bring technology skills into a business and the cost of employing (or contracting) expensive developers who do not understand your business. This quickly circled to a point which has come up at every roundtable so far — it is a very people led process with technology as an enabler — something which Calls9 highly advocates.

Finally, we finished with a quick look of the future (which is not that far away if not already here), including using drones to reduce health and safety risk in certain areas, combined with a little artificial intelligence to streamline processes.

If your business is not innovating or your people are not ready to innovate, you need to do something about it before your competitors overtake you. To explore any of the topics raised in this article please feel free to get in touch with us here at Calls9 by emailing richardsutcliffe@calls9.com. For more information about our forthcoming events, please visit www.calls9.com/newsroom/events

About Calls 9

Our mission is to drive business growth and productivity for start-ups, SMEs and enterprises by enabling the design, development and launch of innovative digital solutions in record time.