Top 4 Challenges faced by Professional Services Organizations today – and what to do about it

The global professional services industry is massive and rapidly growing. The market is expected to surpass $8 billion by the end of 2022, presenting tons of opportunities that will see professional service (PS) organizations thrive in years to come.

The rapid rise of disruptive technologies, unpredictable market dynamics, intense global competition, and new business models significantly influence how PS firms operate. However, such popularity comes with a wave of challenges. Today’s PS firms face a unique and near-infinite set of challenges.

Today’s PS industry faces far different and perhaps even more significant challenges than just a few years ago. The industry has seen unprecedented change, with new and more rapidly changing technologies bursting onto the scene. Keeping up with these technologies is a problem and today’s customers emphasize quality service and 24/7/365 responses. More recently, the pandemic aggravated PS organizations’ problems as they strive to map out a comeback, cope with the pressures of digital transformation, survive the competition, and adapt to the changes in the employment market.

In this article, we cover four top challenges faced by PS firms today and their solutions.

Top Challenges

1. Balancing Work Assignments with A Remote Workforce

Remote and mobile work has existed for a while, but no one prepared PS firms for the sudden rise in the number of people working full time from home during and after the COVID-19 crisis. Adjusting to that reality ‌was an overwhelming problem for most firms. Even worse, the remote workforce has to work in environments characterized by an excessive amount of information, endless distractions, and interruptions from kids, just to name a few.

With clients’ increasing demands, employees are forced to multitask and, as a result, lose significant time, focus, and creativity needed to deliver. So, it’s become extremely difficult to juggle between projects, maintain great customer service, and achieve a sustainable work/life balance. So how can PS firms tackle this problem?

PS firms stand a great chance of resolving this challenge by adopting a Professional Services Automation (PSA) system. It’s an all-in-one alternative tool for addressing multiple PS business processes such as project management, resource planning, invoicing, business intelligence, time tracking, and many more. In other words, PSA creates the necessary structure to ensure all business functions, processes, and procedures are carried out efficiently, even at the remote level.

Some of its benefits to PS organizations include standardizing working methods, a central database, real-time reporting, audit trail, integration and collaborative capabilities, process automation, and reduced administration costs.

2. Onboarding and Mentoring/Training New Remote Staff

The PS sector has been hit hard by the dreaded skill shortage since the pandemic. So, finding and recruiting the right talent is already a major problem. However, talent sourcing is just the tip of the iceberg regarding the challenges PS firms face concerning employee recruitment, particularly, onboarding, mentoring, and/or training new remote staff. Integrating new hires, mentoring, and training them remotely is a new phenomenon for most PS organizations that were used to traditional systems.

The challenges associated while performing these critical HR functions include difficulty setting up the ‌tech, building culture and relationships, navigating virtual communication, delivering the right support, lack of engagement, and lack of face-to-face supervision.

The good news is that there are ways to minimize this problem. The best thing PS organizations can do is have an elaborate plan regarding the onboarding process, mentoring, and training of new remote hires. The plan should include measures to ensure recruits have the dedicated time and resources to set up their work station, procedures for physical and virtual connections to instill and strengthen culture, and communication guidelines. As far as training is concerned, proper and adequate tools should be put in place to help speed up the process. For example, using software solutions to fully automate onboard training for new remote staff.

3. Customer Relationships/Effectiveness in A Remote Culture

Fostering and maintaining customer relationships in the past was simple–it involved in-person meetings and one-on-one interactions. However, these traditional methods are close to becoming obsolete in today’s digitally driven world. The presence of technology, globalization of the services economy, and increasing agility in business operations have seen today’s customers become more knowledgeable, thus causing a shift in their expectations. They have more options so if the quality is compromised, they seek alternatives. They also demand prompt customer service no matter the time of day or night.

With the competition intensifying, the need for close customer relationships is more important than ever. PS firms can achieve this goal by defining and consistently delivering on customer project requirements. So, adopting a CRM solution that can be easily integrated with your PSA solution should not be up for debate. The tool intelligently stores and manages customers’ information to offer customers a unique and seamless experience and build better relationships. In a remote culture that lacks defined processes for meeting customer expectations, the CRM system handles that automatically with just a switch of a button.

4. Growth vs. Profitability

Whether to make growth or profits a priority is always a tough decision for any business, but more complex for PS organizations today. Growth is necessary to survive the rapidly growing competition. But it comes at a cost and requires some level of risk-taking. At the same time, even with sufficient resources and the ability to take risks, growth isn’t always guaranteed.

Profitability is also essential; it serves as fuel for your business. Optimizing business profitability often involves cutting costs, increasing revenues, or both. Many businesses opt to cut costs to avoid unforeseeable risks but this sometimes comes with its own set of risks.

So, the best way forward is to find a perfect balance between the pursuit of profits and growth. The reason behind this is simple–you can’t have a business that survives without being profitable, and you can’t have a profitable business without growth. It has to be both-you must give profitability and growth equal attention. This requires you to get the most out of your team by incorporating measures to increase productivity.

How Top Step Can Help

Every business faces challenges, but according to the article, firms in the PS sector face a unique set of adverse challenges. Fortunately, Top Step can help PS firms grow, become more competitive, and address the above-illustrated and similar problems.

Our goal is to simplify and standardize business operations, maximize productivity, encourage collaboration, boost project visibility, and optimize resource utilization, among other aspects of running a PS firm.

To learn more, check our service page or contact us here.