An Interview With My Firms App

We are very excited to have MyFirmsApp as the sponsors of the inaugural British Accounting Marketing Awards.

One of the reasons why they are an excellent fit with the awards is because they understand the power of building relationships with clients, and how it is pivotal in the success of accounting practices.

MyFirmsApp develops compliant, personalised Apps with a wide range of tools that leverage the power of mobile technology and put the accountant right at the centre of the mobile world.

Mobile Apps keep users more engaged and build brand loyalty by providing users with greater functionality, integration, simplicity and utility. Rather than wading through numerous ‘best of breed’ Apps on their mobile devices, clients can save time by accessing their accounts, finance and tax information and systems through a single App and this helps cement the firm’s position as its clients’ trusted and most authoritative anchor point in the mobile world.

I decided that the best way to share more about them was to ask them a few questions…

What was it about the British Accounting Marketing Awards that made you want to get involved?

This is the first time that the profession will be able to see what others are doing in terms of pro-active marketing to win new clients and raise the profile of their practices. Sharing best-practice and what really works will make a huge difference to accountants that want to develop their marketing potential.

What do you think is they key opportunities for accounting practices over the next 12-36 months?

There is no doubt that disruptive technology is turning the Accountant’s relationship with clients on its’ head. Advances in mobile technology are shaking up traditional methods of communication and clients are engaging more with their smartphones and expecting fast service responses from their chosen advisers anytime, anywhere. New advances in App-driven technology can power day-to- day processes in accountancy practices and make them more efficient and help to solve this year’s compliance challenges of GDPR and MTD. To thrive in this digital world, we firmly believe that new approaches and new tools are required and that’s why we have developed the brand new ‘OneApp’ platform, which we will be showing at Accountex.

How do you support accounting practices to achieve their goals?

Our priority is putting accountants first and helping guide them into the digital world. MyFirmsApp is the only company to offer 24-hour on-going support, backed by the wealth of experience that comes from running the largest global customer App platform in the world for accountants in practice. We do this thanks to a highly talented, dedicated and passionate team, who are all part of the MyFirmsApp family.

What is on the horizon for MyFirmsApp and the accounting profession?

Delivering a solution that aids GDPR compliance is a natural next stage for the App platform and we are working closely with selected global law firms to ensure the newly developed OneApp platform performs this vital role in collecting and verifying data, gaining opt in permissions, sharing privacy policies and in storing and managing key data in a compliant and user-friendly manner.

We have already begun to build AI into our web, mobile and connected-device Apps using the next generation technology platform, Amazon Lex. Our pioneering development team will be trialing Amazon ALexa’s speech recognition and natural language understanding capabilities with the potential to build an entirely new generation of Apps that have human-like intelligence and can see, hear, speak, understand and interact with the world around them.  The potential to add a voice or text chat interface to create bots on mobile devices that can help with basic tasks is set to transform how advisers respond to customer requests and make them more productive.

What do you think is the biggest marketing opportunity for firms that is being underutilised at the moment?

The use of push notification messages that are short text like messages, which are sent instantly and automatically land on all App users’ phones or tablets. The beauty of this method is that most people have their phones with them all the time and messages don’t have to fight for visibility with hundreds of other emails in a crammed-full inbox or a pile of junk mail carefully filtered by a secretary or PA.

This method of secure communication has a 90% open rate compared with emails that have an open rate of around 4%. Furthermore they provide a helpful, additional layer of protection and ensure any information relayed is totally secure.

If you could share one message with the profession what would it be?

Technology is evolving at an amazing rate there is a compelling opportunity for all firms, large and small, to reboot their data protection and privacy processes and turn to digital technology to prepare for GDPR and MTD. An inclusive, compliant App platform that reflects the importance the firm places on privacy, will deepen digital trust, make clients feel more secure when they give their personal data to the firm and help enhance the practice’s reputation.

Mobile is undeniably now the first screen with each user spending nearly 1.5 months in Apps per year (App Annie). Despite irrefutable evidence that Apps are here to stay; the question is still asked; ‘Will my client use an App?’ Our response is always ‘It’s your clients that are driving the demand for easier engagement and they are already using Apps in their day to day life; checking bank balances, the weather, the news, social media, doing their shopping’.

You can discover more about My Firms App by visiting their website here.