How Law Firms can Effectively Nurture the Relationships With Their Clients by Using a CRM

Client Relationship Management or CRM is a strategy implemented by businesses to maintain effective knowledge about and connections with current, previous and potential clients. By using CRM, team members of your law firms are able to nurture relationships with your clients. Many law firms, especially small firms, have experienced a late adoption of the CRM and they are not aware still of the potential of these tools or what tare they used for.

The main goal of a CRM is to help your law firm build and maintain customer connections. Some of the key benefits of Customer Relationship Management applications are to:

• Help you improve the entire sales cycles
• Increase customer satisfaction by customizing processes and creating unique follow-ups.
• Launch targeted marketing campaigns that address customers needs.
• Streamline processes within your law firm and provide a single, detailed view of the customer.

What are the main features a CRM should include?

CRM is being widely used across every industry to track prospects and already paying customers. Businesses can, therefore, achieve higher performance and efficiency by eliminating administrative tasks and keeping customers’ data stored safely. Moreover, all the team members are updated regarding a client’s case and information does not get lost.
Although the benefits for law firms are immense by using CRM law firms can avoid using tools such as Excel Spreadsheets for lead tracking and rely on a more solid CRM. The main benefits CRM bring to the legal industry are as follows:

Better relationship management

The main goal of using a CRM is to grow law firms and build stronger client relationships. Although the available CRM is not exactly designed to meet the needs of a law firm they are becoming closer to achieve most to the basic functionality law firms need to run. The basic features a software should include are:
Contact database. Store all your leads and clients information and any contacts you would want to keep the contact details of. Classify your connections and never lose information.

Lead status tracking. Identify your top prospects and what clients need to be prioritized. CRMs allow you to assign specific statuses to the type of contacts you have

Lead Source tracking. Identify where your clients are coming from and what source is more effective to bring more paying clients. You can measure the probability of closing a client based on past information.

Matter tracking. This is the most important feature when a client has a legal matter to be solved, you can start storing and tracking the information and files regarding that matter.

Document signing & Templates. This has become one must-have feature which is starting to become included in specific industry software. With the rise of initiatives such as Contractbook, it is very easy to have all the contacts in one place, modify and share them with your clients/

Notes. Keep track of everything is happening with each one of your matter and connections. You can keep track of all their details

Task/reminders. Set up tasks and reminders and assign them to your team members to help you remember important deadlines.

Email Sync. Keep all the conversations in one place by connecting your email account to your CRM.

Notifications system. As soon as there is a modification either in a contract, the status of a client or a new email you can track everything in one place.

Analyze the overall performance of a law firms’ activity

The second benefit of using a CRM for law firms is the ability to track the performance of your law firm, how many clients have hired your services, how many cases were close, which are the sources bringing more leads to your firm. All this information and a lot more needs to be measured to understand what needs to be improved in a law firm to make it more efficient/

Law firms are not well known for using analytics to improve business performance. Although metrics are crucial for the overall functioning of a business, law firms have rarely considered them. The lack of incentive to innovate is what will bring their extinction in the future.

This is starting to change for some law firms using CRMs since most of them have built basic analytics tools visible in their dashboards. Some basic analytics you could track are:

• Client conversion rate: how many leads have become paying clients?
• Pipeline value: how much revenue you can generate from the matters registered in the CRM?
• Lead Sources: How leads find your law firm?
• Lead Source over time: Are the lead generating sources changing over time?
• Top matter types: What matters are the matters bringing more revenue?

You can beautifully visualize and analyze all this information by generating charts and reports that most often come included in most CRMs.

Well defined workflow to improve operations and higher conversions

As clients are asking for lower prices and more value, the pressure is higher than ever to provide a quality service, faster and at a lower price. Only law firms implementing well-defined workflows will be able to strive.
The legal sales cycle, depending on the practice area can be long, therefore using a CRM helps you nurture your relationships with clients by adding notes and setting follow up reminders. With time you want to also streamline client intake to make the sales process a lot easier and organized, leading to more conversions and happier clients.
Some processes you can streamline during client intake are:

• Matter checklists. Prepare checklists for each one of the services with tasks to be completed and information to collect during intake.
• Intake form builder. Build standard intake forms to collect information from your clients. They should be able to complete them from their mobile phones, tablets or desktop.
• Contract drafting. Save time by drafting and storing contracts in the same CRM and get notified if a change happens.
• E-signatures. Save time and resources with e-Signatures features and send them to your clients.
• 3rd party Integrations. It is difficult to find all the features in one software.
  When a feature such as billing and invoicing is needed you can solve that by connecting a 3rd party application to your current CRM. This allows you to automate all the processes and information between the applications connected.

Although you can find more and more industry-specific software, CRM such as ZohoCRM may not meet 100% all your law firm’s need nevertheless it can benefit tremendously your firm

If you haven’t adopted a CRM solution yet, we encourage to visit our software review article, otherwise, you can contact us for more information about software implementation.