Every client who comes to your law firm experiences the same four touchpoints: acquisition, delivery, loyalty and retention. These four stages represent the client lifecycle, and mastering them is key to your business growth.

By putting your client at the very centre of your business decisions, you can build a clearer picture of their expectations and their risk profile—-all the while leveraging technology to drive efficiency and profitability within your firm.

Whether it’s your processes, your technology or your customer service, honestly assessing how your law firm is performing at each of the following stages is the first step to understanding where your client lifecycle might be falling behind.

Acquisition

When it comes to client acquisition, your main goal is to turn a prospective client into a paying client as quickly as possible. That means rapid communications, intuitive onboarding and convenient payment/signature methods.

This is the stage of the lifecycle where clients will build their first impressions of your law firm. Having efficient digital processes in place from the start will therefore go a long way in dampening any initial doubts they might be having – not to mention making your life a lot easier too.

Benefits

• Better understand risk with effective due diligence
• Collect client information easily for future analysis
• Commence billable work faster

Delivery

As the section of the lifecycle which usually involves the most touchpoints, the delivery stage is where clients will develop the majority of their opinions about you. Alongside successfully resolving their case, delivering a seamless customer experience here is non-negotiable if you really want to exceed their expectations.

Automating traditionally time-consuming tasks is one of the best ways you can do this, for two reasons. First, it frees up time to focus on more valuable work. Second, it’s more convenient for the client. Make sure you’re constantly evaluating your delivery processes to see how you can continue to improve them well into the future.

Benefits

• Identify bottlenecks in processes and drive efficiencies
• Automate digital processes to focus on billable time
• Enhance CRM or case management systems

Loyalty

A satisfied client is a loyal client. But if they’re not telling other people about their experience, how much value are they actually bringing to you? Making feedback a fundamental part of the workflow loop, and giving clients incentives to provide it, will help make their loyalty count.

Remember to use that feedback to your advantage. Both positive and negative reviews should be taken on board to understand where you are exceeding expectations and where you are falling short, so that you can optimise the lifecycle even further for future clients.

Benefits

• Improve client satisfaction across the board
• Review feedback to streamline client journeys
• Generate more positive reviews

Retention

More than any other stage, retention is the key to business growth. Winning more work from existing clients, as well as generating instructions from new ones, will help you expand further and faster than before.

With an effective overview of all your clients, you can reflect on which ones bring the most value to you and focus your efforts on them. The good news is, if you’ve put the right amount of work into the previous three stages of the cycle, then retention should happen naturally.

Benefits

• Identify new opportunities for scaling client work
• Increase word of mouth referrals
• Secure new instructions from existing and new clients

Taking the time to really understand your clients can show you who’s a good client for your firm, who pays their bills quickly, how many instructions they give you and what their lifetime value is.

By taking a client-centric approach at each of the four stages, you can gain the insights you need to optimise the processes and the experience across the entire client lifecycle.

Interested in seeing how Legl can help you with your client lifecycle management needs? Schedule a personalised demo with us now!

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