Speaker: Jason Marden, Digital Transformation Project Manager, PKF Smith Cooper
Jason Marden: I'm Jason Marden. I am the digital Transformation Project Manager for PKF Smith Cooper Audit Limited in the North East of Midlands. My role is to sit somewhere between, Head of PMO and Head of Innovation. So it's my job to, source and investigate tools that can be utilised to automate and improve the services that we give to our clients. We are about 270 or so accountants and auditors of various offices across the North East of the Midlands who all have various reasons for using Glasscubes. So we took a look at Glasscubes just before Christmas, took it on trial and then rolled it out to the business just after the end of the tax season when everything had calmed down a bit.
Before using Glasscubes, how did you request information from clients, and what problems or frustrations did that cause?
Jason Marden: Prior to our trial of Glasscubes we had really kind of struggled to get good information from clients, as there are a number of ways out of the business. Certain tools have their own portals, and we also relied on our team members to do a lot of emailing and chasing themselves. So really one of the key frustrations that our staff had was the time taken to follow up on those requests for information, repeatedly, and to essentially make this system, process a lot easier for them. So really Glasscubes stepped in and provided us with a great way that we could create forms that would give us the information we needed, requests that would send them to clients who didn't need to do anything complicated. They just needed to click on a link and then use the system, providing information and it would automatically be sent back to the person who'd sent it to them within the business. If there was a bit of toing and froing, they can talk to one another regarding the documents and the submissions that they've made and once our team are happy we can verify that the documents have been sent and then that's it. We have a library of documents attached to Glasscubes that our staff can use.
Did you have any concerns about moving to a new solution like Glasscubes, and were any of these subsequently realised?
Jason Marden: It's always the nature of the beast that when change comes people will be hesitant and afraid of it and Glasscubes really kind of made that very easy to get over that hump. They were very receptive to the concerns and needs of our stakeholders and we're happy to sit in and jump in on workshops to provide the exact specifications for things that our teams needed. So the teams that did the demo and worked with Glasscubes during that demo phase really kind of got the best of the tool. I'm pleased to say that none of the fears that we felt we may have, about you know what the system could or couldn't do were ever realised. We were quite happy with what we got and in fact as we go day-by-day and you know, request-by-request we find more that the tool does, and we find more use cases that we can apply it to. So we're very happy with Glasscubes and continue to use it to this day and really look forward to what comes in the future with them.
Please describe working with us. How has Glasscubes helped you, your firm, and/or your clients?
Jason Marden: I personally have found working with Glasscubes to be very, very easy. They have some really great members of their team, in particular I'd like to call out Craig, who was the first contact we had selling us the tool. Harpal our account manager, and Kevin Senior who is the tech guy that's been kind of helping us to develop our instance of Glasscubes. We have had quite a lot of good engagements with them a lot of good interactions and our, our firm and our staff are very happy with the interactions they've had. They've always been receptive to what we've asked of them and have given us best practise and guidance wherever we've asked for it. The best thing that I personally have had dealings with from them is the development forum that all the companies that use their tool have access to. People will go on there and log new ideas, which they will pick up and develop or they will tell you about use cases they have and it gives you an idea of the sort of capabilities and functionality of the tool because when you're told about it, you know, you think it's a portal, but it does so much more than just being a portal. In terms of our clients, our clients are very happy. They receive a very nice window into PKFSC, which is branded with our name so they don't feel like they're being spammed by another company. They can talk directly to their account managers and the people who are dealing with their submissions and they never have to have a password or a log in. They simply click on the link as it's sent to them, as and when it's sent to them, and they can go in and very easily just access any communications or submit any documents that have been requested of them. We're very happy with how Glasscubes have been helping us to work.
Jason Marden: I'd say we would be very likely to recommend Glasscubes, and we already have. We are part of a larger network, PKF and we have some sister firms in the UK based in London and in the South West. One of those was thinking about client portals and reached out to us and said, "What are we doing in this space?" And we discussed Glasscubes with them. I showed them how the system works, gave them a bit of a demo and then sort of told them, about the the pros and the cons of it and all the stuff I've been talking about in these videos. They were very happy. They want to use it in a very similar way to we do, so there's a lot of shared work that we can do with them. If anyone's watching this video and is thinking, well yeah, I guess we could take a look at Glasscubes I would say you should. You should do it soon because Glasscubes is refreshingly easy to use. It's very, very simple for your staff to utilise, and for your clients to engage with, its picked up, it's very intuitive. So it doesn't take a lot of training to get people working in the system and the people that are, sort of sending files in and submissions are the clients. Clients find it a really nice and clean and fresh way to send data in it. It's a very modern looking tool that has a very kind of simple idea behind it and as I said this in earlier videos, there's so much more the tool does than just sending a request to someone and again something back. I use it for internal forms and one of our teams uses it as a data room. So they've built a structure of workspaces that they can collect data during submissions and then extract it and do work on it that way. So, yeah, if you think about Glasscubes and you're considering it, I would recommend them very highly and it's certainly something you should do sooner rather than later. Their turnaround is very quick. They can have you in an instance of the tool in a couple of days, so I would certainly give it a look.
