Keys to Creating an Unmatched Legal Tech Client Experience

“Trust is earned in drops and lost in buckets.” That is what bestselling author Kevin Kelly said about the client experience, and it is true – every time we engage with clients, we have an opportunity to gain or lose their trust. Solve a client’s problem and incrementally increase their trust in your company. Fail to serve them successfully even once, and a whole bucket of trust goes over the side. This imbalance may seem unfair, but failure erodes trust faster than success builds it.

Law firms and legal tech companies alike want to hone their client experience approach and outcomes to build trust and enhance the client experience. However, although it may seem complicated to tackle something as subjective as how people feel about you, there are strategies to help.

As Chief Client Officer at Aderant, I was tasked with creating an “unmatched client experience” – viewing every client interaction as an opportunity to build trust. Legal technology companies seeking to achieve similar outcomes may consider the following recommended best practices. And for law firms on the receiving end, hopefully these strategies will help you get more satisfaction from your vendor relationships.

Charting The Client Journey

To deliver an unmatched client experience and gain trust, first wrap your arms around the client’s journey from the very start. Why did the client decide on you versus your competitors, and what are they expecting? Clients are looking for a provider who understands what they are trying to achieve and then delivers that experience. If they are migrating to a cloud solution, are they looking for a better support experience, scalability, performance, security, or all the above? If they are switching away from a competitor, why are they making the change, and what problems are they entrusting you to solve? These are the initial stages of the client’s journey, and can lead to a plan established in advance. A well-planned trip is more likely to be successful.

Creating a World Without Borders

Ideally, clients will exist in a world where the service or product providers are flexible enough to seamlessly blend into the client’s organization, achieving a world without borders. This synchronization requires engagement from all factions within the product and service provider’s company, engagement of the leadership team, support services, client success, and sales/marketing.

Enhanced Cross-Functional Collaboration for Client Success

As legal tech companies, rigidity in our process is typically an obstacle to the client’s experience. Therefore, the way we “team” needs to be different. A team is not necessarily a support team or a professional services team of individuals that all have similar job descriptions. Instead, the alternative vision is that a team is comprised of people from various functions, such as support, professional services, client success, cloud operations, and development, which all help the client achieve a desired outcome.

Breaking down unneeded walls between departments can result from reexamining the client’s experience and reteaming to address the problem correctly. This is a question of having the right person for the right job at the right time, remembering that the client’s requirements will evolve. Legal tech companies are responsible for preventing anything from getting in the way of delivering an outstanding client experience, and for leveraging creative team design to eliminate obstacles to success.

Effectively Measuring Success

Though it may be challenging to measure success in customer experience, we have tools at our disposal. How else will we know if our strategies are working? Legal tech companies may establish their own internal Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), which might not always align with the service preferences of law firms. At times, KPIs must yield to the client’s needs – this can lead to innovation so both our organizations and our clients are satisfied.

The Power of Listening

At all intersections of interaction with the client, the power of listening is essential. By listening to clients, we understand the perspectives of different people and what outcome they are looking to drive. Armed with the intelligence gathered by listening, we can then align our systems, processes, and people to help them achieve what they want.

Recently, I have realigned our internal teams to establish more rigor in our ability to connect with and listen to clients, including “listening KPIs” to measure our client relationships based on their feedback.

We are beginning to utilize a Customer Effort Score (CES) to assess the level of effort clients must invest from their own resources when resolving issues related to our solutions. We want to reduce the amount of effort required by our clients to achieve their optimal outcomes when they buy, implement, or troubleshoot our software.

These metrics allow our client success team to gather quality feedback. Equipped with these listening metrics, we see a clearer picture holistically across our systems and processes, gauging how our clients feel about us. How is our performance impacting clients, and where is room for improvement? We aim to build an outside-in approach where we listen to clients and then change our internal measurements and resources to achieve what they want.

Achieving the Unmatched Client Experience

Ambitious goals are the best ones, since they push us hard to accomplish more, and achieving an unmatched client experience is ambitious. Creating a well-orchestrated client journey - which is appropriately teamed based on listening to the client - is a productive strategy. Also, finding meaningful metrics that hold you accountable to an objective standard will keep you on the right track. There remains much to learn about improving the client experience, so maintaining focus on achieving practical results is essential. Drop by drop, bucket by bucket, legal tech vendors can effectively provide an unmatched client experience to law firms and retain their trust.