Updated on March 12, 2024
The accountancy market in the UK
The accountancy market in the UK has been growing steadily, despite challenging economic conditions globally. The UK has one of the highest concentrations of finance professionals in the world, with many of the global accounting firms headquartered in London.
The UK exported £3.1 billion in accounting services in 2021 alone, and there were 450,000 accountancy jobs in 2021 alone. In 2022, the UK’s top 10 accounting firms generated £19.9 billion in total fee income. According to this report, there are 94,000 accountancy firms in the UK, with a vast majority of them facing technological challenges.
Enter Crunch
Crunch is not just your typical accounting firm. Sure, they do provide accounting services, but, over the past decade and a half since they have been in business, Crunch has evolved into an all-in-one financial partner for small businesses and freelancers in the UK.
It all started in the year 2007, when Crunch’s CEO Darren Fell felt that the traditional accounting firms were not providing a service up to the mark. He started Crunch as a fairly priced, all-inclusive service for small businesses and freelancers. Crunch combined an online accounting software with in-house support.
Today, Crunch boasts of over 30,000 customers who use their user-friendly software and also benefit from their skilled team of Client Success managers. Crunch aimed to be the perfect mix of technology and human touch. This is where they needed a solution like Kommunicate.
Finding Kommunicate – The need for a low code no code platform
Crunch was handling a lot of phone calls and emails from a diverse client base. These clients needed answers quickly. Many of these queries were repetitive in nature, which is the perfect use case for a chatbot.
The team at Crunch wanted a solution that did not require too much manpower, since they did not want to commit a lot of their talented developers to this project. They scouted various online platforms and forums, looking for low-code/ no-code platforms.
Crunch was looking for a platform that could easily connect to their existing tech stack of Salesforce as CRM, Slack as their internal messaging platform and Dialogflow as the NLP. They looked at client recommendations and online groups. With Kommunicate’s comprehensive answer list online, Crunch found just what they were looking for.
How Crunch is using the Kommunicate platform
Crunch wanted to use Kommunicate as a self-serve platform and reduce the inbound communication and increase the speed at which customers were getting answers to their queries. Crunch already had a live chat feature powered by Salesforce, but this had become too expensive.
As a cost effective alternative to Salesforce Live Chat, Kommunicate addressed the problem of quick replies beautifully. Crunch deployed the chatbot on their Marketing website, a free and paid software product, with each of them linked to a separate DialogFlow knowledge base tailored to the specific product.
Crunch also uses Kommunicate to give their paying customers the ability to connect to a Customer manager via Live chat. This is where Kommunicate’s bot to human handoff comes in really handy.
Luca – Crunch’s Chatbot – Garnering positive reviews all around
Crunch has decided to call their chatbot Luca, and it has been getting a lot of attention from website visitors. The team at Crunch retrospectively added questions and answers to Dialogflow’s knowledge engine whenever a client asked a new question.
With this, the team at Crunch ensured that the chatbot was under continuous improvement, minimizing the possibility of less satisfactory responses. In the future, Crunch plans to leverage the Chatbot interface and Luca as their AI Assistant to provide their clients insights into their business data.
For instance, Luca can analyze account data for tax-saving/ business performance advice and highlight the competitive pricing in their region.
What Crunch has to say:
