Friday, January 24, 2025

Using AI to Create Personalized Summaries for Clients

Toni Witt

Today's Topic: Using AI to Create Personalized Summaries for Clients

Last December I went to the DCPA conference in Denver. I went to a session on customer service for tax pros, led by Nicole Davis. What she said will stick with me forever:

Most tax pros think of customer service as a cost, a burden. In reality, it's the #1 growth driver for your business.

Customer service is a marketing expense. A great service experience can build your reputation more than any ad ever will as your clients will rave about you to their friends.

But creating an exceptional experience can feel daunting, especially in the middle of tax rush. That's where AI can help.

And the best area to start is having AI create personalized summaries of your client's returns. Instead of just sending them a done return, you can send them a customized review that breaks down their return, explains the important numbers, and gives them ideas on how to reduce their tax bill next year.

Going the extra mile makes all the difference. All of the best practices do it.

Different ways to deliver a return review with AI

1. Make a Loom video

Screenshare your client's return and narrate over the major details they should know, explain why they owe certain things, and what they can do for next year. A few minutes is good enough.

At Nicole's practice, they use interns to do this without burdening the accounting staff during tax season.

This strategy is best when you really want to wow your clients - especially the high value ones.

How can you use AI to make this easier? Feed in your client's return and ask it for taking points for the video. Then have your intern read it off on Loom.

Here's a great example video from Nicole.

2. Email or text-based summary

Making a Loom video can take time. For your lower-value clients or 1040 returns, you can just send them a detailed email or Google Doc.

AI can generate the whole email or doc. It can even generate some visuals like YoY changes, graphs, etc.

How to structure the return review

This is totally up to you and your client's preferences. If you use AI to generate the review, you can always tweak the context & prompt to get what you want.

But in general:

  • Executive summary
  • Key findings
  • Anomalies
  • Comparison to last year
  • Suggestions for next year
  • Anything specific to their tax filing status or entity

Make sure you're available to answer any questions your clients might have after seeing the review.

Go the extra mile: WOW your clients

Let's face it: great customer service is built by exceeding expectations. WOW moments. To build a practice that changes lives, you need to go above and beyond. Here are some AI-powered ways to do that.

  1. Have AI generate a complete infographic of your client's return review
  2. Attach an AI-generated 1-page "Next Year Tax Savings Roadmap" personalized to their situation. Give the AI as much context on your client as possible.
  3. Handwritten Thank-You Note. Ok, this can’t be automated, but maybe that’s why it works so well. You can have an intern do it, instead.
  4. Candidly ask for feedback on your service.

P.S. this email series is by CleanUpBuddy.ai, which helps you turn a tangle of bank statements into a clean P&L in under a minute using AI.

It's great for those Schedule C clients without clean books. You know who I'm talking about. Feel free to check out our site to see how we can help you reclaim hours of manual work this tax rush without outsourcing or hiring.

We also invite you to join our Discourse community for other bookkeepers & tax pros using CleanUpBuddy here. We'll add more content there as well as announce events, special promos, and more.

Thanks for tuning in, happy to help with any questions. Just drop a reply.

Touch base next week,

~Toni, CEO of CleanUpBuddy.ai