Closing the Perception Gap – Delivering Awesome Service Throughout Your Law Firm
This blog focuses on the crucial role of customer service in setting law firms apart from their local competitors. It highlights the challenge of differentiating one's firm and emphasises that exceptional customer service is the key to achieving this.
As anyone involved in law firm management will know, differentiating your firm from other firms in the locality is a challenge. In my opinion, customer service is the only way that most law firms can achieve differentiation in the eyes of the client. Law firms should be looking to provide a consistently high level of service to all clients – awesome service to every client, everybody, every time – should be your goal.
It is important to realise that customer service is a constantly moving target. What is considered excellent today becomes average, and after that, quite frankly embarrassing. Therefore, your approach to customer service needs to evolve and continuously improve. Quite often in law firms, there can be a gap between what the law firm feels is awesome service and what the client experiences—the “perception gap,” as I call it. I have outlined below a few tips on how law firms can close the perception gap and ensure that service levels delivered by the firm align with the client’s experience.
- Listen to more of your clients, more often – Practice active client listening by asking open-ended questions about service levels. Reflect on what you hear and invite feedback during the lifetime of the matter, not just at the end via the standard Lexcel-type questionnaire.
- Adopt a customer experience minute in your law firm – Start each meeting in your firm with one of the attendees sharing a recent experience where awesome service has been delivered by someone in the firm. Your team will soon realise the importance you place on customer service, and standards will rise accordingly.
- Keep clients informed and communicate with them – The most common form of complaint about lawyers is not that they got the law wrong – it is about failing to keep clients updated. At the start of the matter, establish the client’s preferred method and frequency of communication, and make sure you deliver on this throughout the life cycle of the matter.
- Empower your clients to update themselves – Invest in user-friendly, self-service portals that update the client in real time. The client feels empowered and can track progress, freeing the lawyer to progress the matter.
- Act on feedback received – If you have asked your client for feedback, do not ignore it. Instead, demonstrate to your client that you have listened and explain what action you’ll be taking as a result.
Law firms that consistently deliver great service and delight their clients in the process are the firms that are likely to thrive in the future.
If you’d like to discuss any of the themes set out in this blog, please contact me at ih@hopkinslegalconsulting.co.uk or call me on 0791 666 9095.