Streamline customer contact management for Legal Services

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Kumi this is villager a CEO with modern life practice hopefully you can hear me I'm outside today may sound a little rayji a little rant II um we're gonna talk about customer service and some of the recent experiences that I've had that have led to this blog or blog we are in the business of consumer legal services or business legal services unless you work for law firm that is big and you're working on one case and your job is to process paper or type motions or analyze work then maybe your job is to be a lawyer to be to produce legal work but if you are if you work for a small firm or you own a small firm you are in the business of legal services consumer legal services and your job is to serve your clients to meet their goals to meet their objectives and to use your expertise as a word to make that happen and most of us fall short and I've had a couple of experiences in my law firm that I'm going to share where I feel like we've fallen short and I want to talk about how to handle that because how you handle an upset by it matters and I wanted to talk about this a couple weeks ago but it was pretty raw and so when I first recorded about what happens in my law firm and showed it to a couple people they were like no can't can't post this yet it's too raw so but before we even get there I want to talk about an experience that I am having with a separate company so about well in April in April I started talking to a company grow calm that provides dashboards it's a business intelligence dashboard because I wanted my key performance indicators for my law firm real-time all this time whenever I wanted it I wanted to be able to go to my dashboard and have it be updated with the latest data because what I needed to do was have my aunts manager Kaitlyn pull that data put it into a spreadsheet and show it to me and she did that at regular intervals but sometimes I wanted it and it wasn't at that interval um and as we were working with other law firms and providing them with those same reports I wanted to make sure that we had the ability to get the data in real time and give it to them so they weren't waiting either so I started talking to this business intelligence dashboard solution okay I've had to come inside cuz it was really loud outside but hopefully you could hear me and I was talking his business intelligence at work and I was telling him exactly what I wanted to do so I've got these various systems and I want you to pull this data and I want you to be able to show me this report and I wanted them to be able to pull from Infusionsoft from Google sheets from Clio from quickbooks online in order to get the the key performance indicators that are most important to me in my life and they said absolutely no problem that's what we do so I signed up I signed a 12-month contract I paid a $1500 onboarding fee and then signed up for $600 a month thereafter it's not a small investment but they weren't quite clear that they could do what I wanted them to do and so we began the process of building out the reports in our initial meeting I said here are the data points in the various software that you need to pull in order to build what I want we worked with them over a period of months to attempt to build it talk to Cleo because we weren't really able to get the information we needed out there API and come July I was banging my head up against a wall because I had paid quite a bit of money and it wasn't really working it was sort of working I was sort of getting information I needed I could get in big data but I couldn't get anything else and that wasn't what I had intended when I signed up so we had a call with their well first when I said hey I'm not really happy with this I need to talk to a manager this isn't really working for me I'm gonna have to go in another direction because I started researching other options that would meet my needs um the salespersons response to me was you signed a contract you signed a 12-month contract and you're going to need to continue paying us and my answer to him was can I trust your manager because I'm pretty sure regardless of whether or not I sign the contract if you showed me something that doesn't meet my needs you don't really want me paying for it being all angry that's terrible customer service and it took me probably three times of asking him if I could talk to his manager before he finally let me talk to his manager and after a conversation this person agreed he didn't want us paying for software that we weren't using that's not good for anyone so we're we gonna give it one more shot he was gonna suspend the payments and we were gonna try one more time to see if we could get this software to work for us that was in July it didn't work it's now October October they never suspended payments paid the entire time and when I went back to say hey guys you said you were gonna suspend this it's not working I got the same answer from another salesperson or another day two got sorry you sign the contract well you said you would provide us you said you would suspend payment you said you knew your product could do what I was very specific in what you wanted it to do and the overall handling of this situation has just been so bad from day one here's why if I had engaged with them and said very clearly here's what I want you to do and and they had said to me well that may work it may not you may need additional development here are the things we know work very well here are the other things that can be trickier I would have gone into it with a different expectation and so many times attorneys talk about clients having unrealistic expectations but I really think that that comes from the attorney I had different expectations because they sold me something that they couldn't deliver on and that's probably why most of our clients have unrealistic expectations if we say to them we're gonna be responsive we can do X Y & Z and then we're not responsive well we don't do X Y & Z they're gonna be angry and when we turn around and say well you have unrealistic expectations that's our bad that's our fault if grow calm had truly listened to me and communicated the strengths and weaknesses the pros and cons the ability of their software and the inability of their sufferer I would not be upset I would have decided how I wanted to spend my money and that's really what customer service comes down to I would have been happy to pay for a product that deliver your clients are happy to pay for product they expect but when their expectations are not met because of either timeframe or the details that's when they get upset and I want to transition to talking about some things that have happened recently in my firm to exact several weeks ago I met with a client and her husband and they were very upset they had met with and worked with a former attorney of mine that I had liked and when I let him go it was within two weeks of their final trial he had done a lot of work on their case and it wouldn't make sense for us to continue modern law to pick up where this other attorney had left off so I recommended to them that they stick with this other attorney through the end of their case but they felt don't they felt lost they felt like I had let them down because they came to me and they trusted me and I said work with this person he's got better experience on your type of case he's fully equipped to handle it that was my promise and they had not experienced that they thought that it took him about 30% longer to do things that should have they gave me lots of examples where they had to give him information more than once they were heartbroken they were betrayed and they felt betrayed and they felt like they had overpaid so I could have argued with them I could have said you signed a contract you send a contract that said you'd pay for our time regardless of how much time it took but that is the wrong way to handle an unhappy time the right way to handle an unhappy client is to listen to take responsibility for your shirt shortcomings and there were some it wasn't there we had done a terrible job and they weren't saying what they were saying was very specifically Billy here with shortcomings and I understand why you let this attorney go but here's how that affected us and I took responsibility for that and I asked them what do you think is fair and they told me here is what I think is fair but before I even got there before I even asked them what do you think is fair I truly let them speak their piece and I affirmed them because there is nothing worse to client then feeling like maybe your attorney isn't on your team nothing worse they are coming to you with a with a problem a big problem a problem so big that they're willing to pay you a very high hourly rate to handle their problem and they're giving you an enormous amount of trust in their life so in this case this was an adult son who was disabled and the mother was trying to get guardianship away from her ex-husband who she did not think was taking very good care of her adult disabled son this is pretty flippin personal she'd taken a long time to decide who she wanted to work with she wanted to work with me I said work with this associate I took responsibility for him it is my responsibility as this law firm owner to listen to his claim to acknowledge her pain [Music] and then ask them what do you think I can do to make this right and they told me and what they told me was reasonable I think that this took 30% longer than it should have I shouldn't have needed to repeat myself I said I agree I wrote them a check and they left feeling okay about the situation feeling like they were treated fairly like they would come back to me but they would expect that I would never hand them off again and it's a massive responsibility when we as law firm owners hand people off to our associates it's a hard hard thing but the most important thing that I did was to truly listen to them and it doesn't matter what their contract says the contract is written to describe and to set out expectations but if expectations aren't met if if we say yes we're going to Bill you hourly but we waste our time or we're inefficient that's not what the client expects the client expects if we're going to build our Lee that we do it that we still behave in an efficient and effective manner and I've told them in all sorts of other marketing materials and in conversations that that's what matters to me so if we failed in that it doesn't matter what the contract says [Music] the other example that happened in my locker recently was I met with a gentlemen who really needed our help but he was all over the place he really had a hard time sticking to a story he was obviously in distress he described previously taking medications for various mental health diagnoses he wasn't taking any currently he was trying to get treatment and I really thought that we could help him and we signed up to take on this case this case was messy his life was messy and we took on his case and as we started it was clear that like it didn't really matter what we were going to do he wasn't going to be happy he wasn't going to be satisfied we went to an order protection hearing and lost despite the fact that the case was tried well that we put on all the evidence and that we felt like the judge had made a mistake and had ruled in the wrong way but there was nothing we could do about it and as we had this conversation over and over and over again and and it was circular it was clear that we would never be able to satisfy this client so we're not providing value it does it doesn't matter if we're able to eventually get him divorced and get his life settle out if he doesn't feel taken care of if he doesn't feel like we're providing value then we're not providing value and we had to figure out a way to as amicably as possible to break up and go our separate ways because if you're in one of those situations you're not doing your client or yourself any favors you will not be able to provide the services that that you want you you will not be able to satisfy this time and that's a hard thing because we really wanted to help him but knowing when customer service requires you to end a relationship is also a really important and really powerful thing you should not work for a client that does not think you're doing a good job for that you should either a figure out how to do a good job for them in that in in so far as they feel you're doing a good job for them or you should end the relationship because our job is to be legal service providers and to provide customer service along with lowering that we're doing if we change the way we think about what our job is what our role is and what we're providing to clients it can help us to really understand the importance of this customer service [Music]