Accountants dip in and out of several different applications in a working day. Any within Microsoft’s Office Suite can make use of Copilot to help stitch them all together. That more joined-up approach can help to streamline and improve client relationship management.

Certified Microsoft 365 specialist Tita Atang, Co-founder of The AI Workflow Lab and host of its accompanying YouTube channel, is taking a keen interest in how the tool can help improve client relations. In Atang’s assessment, accountants who are looking to use Copilot to enhance client relationships must first ensure that they have got all their ducks in a row.

“I don’t want people to think that Copilot is an excuse not to be organised,” he says. “I still encourage accountants to keep their client folders in SharePoint within a tightly regimented structure. Similarly, it helps to have a clear folder system for all your client emails in Outlook. If Copilot can access well-managed client data, that’s half the battle.”

Using Copilot to help manage client follow-ups

Once Copilot is in place across all the Microsoft tools you use for client management – for example, SharePoint, Outlook and Teams – the next step is to understand how best to instruct it.

“You may want to widen your query even further, if you’re concerned that something from three months ago may have slipped through the net,” he says.

Using Copilot to help manage deadlines

For Jamie Pope, Service Delivery Director at Cloud Agile, Copilot can help accountants respond faster to clients and turn up better prepared. However, firms should not allow the tool to be able to decide that the loudest email is automatically the most urgent.

“Each firm must define what ‘client priority’ actually means in its world,” he says. “That requires firms to configure their use of Copilot around meaningful risk criteria.”

Examples include:

• looming statutory or tax deadlines;
• potential financial or regulatory harms;
• client work that is blocked while the firm awaits a response;
• payroll, cash-flow or other payment issues;
• commitments that the firm has not yet fulfilled; and
• client emails that remain unanswered close to the firm’s service target.

“That final instruction is important,” Pope notes. “Copilot should prepare and recommend, but the accountant should review and remain responsible for what reaches the client.

Using Copilot for meeting preparation

When it comes to managing diaries and meetings, Pope says, Copilot can gather relevant emails, previous Teams transcripts and approved documents ahead of new conversations to create a concise briefing. That can help to remind accountants of their commitments and ensure that clients won’t need to repeat information the firm already holds.

After the meeting, Copilot can help turn the transcript or notes into sets of agreed actions, owners and target dates. The accountant should then verify each summary before it is added to the relevant client’s record or circulated.

“The relationship benefit is not merely saving 10 minutes on meeting notes,” Pope says. “It is showing the client that their accountant remembers what was promised, understands the wider context and follows through consistently.”

How to build your prompts

For repeatable results, he advises, accountants should structure prompts around six elements:

• which type of role Copilot should perform;
• sources it may use;
• criteria it should apply;
• the specific outcome required;
• the format of the answer; and
• controls: things it must neither assume, or do.

“Firms could build a small, approved prompt library covering daily email triage, client-meeting preparation, follow-up actions and account-review briefings,” Pope says. “That is likely to be more effective than expecting each employee to invent prompts from scratch.”

Atang stresses that accountants must set up appropriate guardrails to keep Copilot-generated client notes and materials confidential only to those within the relationship. “Copilot can definitely help you respond more quickly to clients, have the right information to hand and free up your time for more productive tasks. The gains may not seem significant with just one client – but if you multiply them per customer and per day, week and year, they will all stack up.”