KPMG rethinks client communication

When KPMG’s Sydney team relocated to new offices at the top of the International Tower in Barangaroo last year, the firm capitalised on a significant opportunity to upgrade client services and boost employee satisfaction and productivity at the same time.

This has included launching new digital services, opening shared innovation spaces where clients and consultants come together to tackle complex business challenges, and the provision of open plan offices, organised by industry solutions and client teams where employees of all levels sit next to one another.

Speaking about the role of technology in this new era of the company, KPMG National Managing Partner, Markets and Growth James Hunter outlined how new applications and platforms are helping employees, and the organisation, achieve more.

“Technology is the fundamental enabler for the way KPMG operates,” he said. “Cloud and digital services have fuelled our move to the digital world, and provided a seamless and efficient way of working that empowers every employee to deliver on our client strategy — solve complex challenges, steer change, disrupt sectors and grow through collaboration and innovation.”

A core component of KPMG’s digital transformation is the firm’s use of Microsoft Dynamics 365, which is improving communication and collaboration among the company’s 5500 employees in Australia.

“We are growing rapidly [and] providing a diverse range of services to over 15,000 companies in Australia,” said Hunter.

“With rapidly changing customer demands, including most senior executives seeking integrated solutions, bringing across KPMG capabilities to deliver outcomes faster than ever before, we need to operate more effectively and seamlessly.

“Microsoft Dynamics 365 enables KPMG meet these challenges, and provide a much stronger client experience every time we interact,” he added.

“The enhanced capabilities around internal collaboration and 360-degree client views are features we’ve been looking to develop for over five years, and moving from our old system to the Microsoft platform has helped deliver them.”

In provisioning its services, KPMG will commonly hold relationships with a number of stakeholders in each of its clients — from a handful in growing and family businesses up to 100+ among larger organisations.

This creates challenges in efficiently keeping track and sharing most recent updates — including lead and opportunity management, and event management — limiting KPMG’s ability to offer its full range of services to tackle the challenges at hand.

The need to address this challenge was made more pressing as KPMG encouraged employees to be more agile in their working day.

Using Microsoft Dynamics 365, KPMG now has a single view of each client contact, with a record of the latest interactions, updates and opportunities available on any device at any time.

Employees are increasingly finding themselves empowered to deliver an improved standard of service due to the level of insight they now have.

KPMG National Managing Partner, Markets and Growth James Hunter.

“We needed a vehicle through which we could better understand client issues across different people within the same organisation,” Hunter said.

“Microsoft Dynamics 365 brings these insights into one single platform, enabling us to offer a better value proposition for clients.

“There is no longer a need to recap discussions between team members, with updates now taking place rapidly and seamlessly — sometimes on the way to and from meetings via the mobile application.

“Client experiences have improved significantly as a result, and relationships and the way they are managed have risen to another level.”

KPMG selected Microsoft Dynamics 365 following a competitive tender process, where the firm noted three features that made the technology the most suitable.

Beginning with usability, KPMG needed a tool which was easy to use, and which would integrate seamlessly with its existing Microsoft stack.

Microsoft Dynamics delivered on this with the solution integrating effortlessly into Outlook, as well as being offered through a mobile application, ensuring updates and interactions could be easily and efficiently logged in near real time.

Secondly, the firm wanted a comprehensive CRM platform that required minimal customisation to allow future updates to be incorporated rapidly as they became available through Microsoft’s trusted and intelligent cloud services.

The third requirement was for a CRM platform that could be deployed quickly and easily.

“Integration, ease of access and strict security protocols around entire business records were crucial factors in our selection of Microsoft technology,” said Hunter.

“The solutions deployed allow us to fulfil a real desire to offer every part of KPMG to each of our clients through a simple and secure platform,” he added.

“Being a large organisation with thousands of users this can sometimes be complex, but this is not the case with Microsoft Dynamics.

“We have had a fantastic response to the rollout — [just] last month we had each of our 450 leaders using it on their mobile devices.”

Delivered ahead of time and on budget, KPMG’s Microsoft Dynamics deployment is driving a cultural change at the firm and shaping new innovations being made available to clients.

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