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Welcome to my blog. I’m Matt Homann, and I share cool ideas that help smart lawyers innovate more, serve their clients better, market more effectively and make more money. How can I help you?
Measuring Quality of Experience and Result
In my post earlier this week, I wrote about Measuring the Quality of Your Clients’ Experiences and not just the quality of their results. Patrick Lamb suggested that lawyers also use the grid to predict their clients’ satisfaction, and I agree.
Here’s a .pdf of a Quality of Experience Survey I designed with pages for both the client as well as attorneys/staff to complete (separately, of course) — along with room for them to suggest improvements. Let me know what you think.
For the Attorneys and Staff to Complete:
For the Clients to Complete:
The General Practitioner’s Dilemma
Remember, your clients don’t have general needs, they have specific ones. They want you to be great at solving their problem, not good at solving everyone else’s.
And yes, you can actually buy this knife
The Race to the Gutter
Wise words about professionalism from Scott Greenfield:
The need to survive in practice is a powerful one. It takes time to establish a reputation of competence and skill, and when you have hungry children and a school loan payment due, you don’t feel as if you have the time to wait. And so you use whatever is at hand. It’s easy to justify at the moment. Until you realize that you are one of those lawyers, walking down the boulevard in hot pants hoping someone will stop and pick you up.
Go read his entire post. Now.
Focus on Quality of Experience
Lots of lawyers claim to be “results-focused.” Clients want good results, after all, and marketing yourself as one “focused” on delivering them has got to be a lot better (to clients, anyway) than being “timesheet-focused.” However, I think many lawyers who focus only on the result are hurting their clients (and their own practices). Let me explain:
Most clients get just one “result” in their matter: it could be a divorce, a home purchase, or a settlement check. Until that moment — which can take months or years to achieve — they wait. They get bills. They attend hearings. They read letters and go to meetings. But they don’t know for certain what’s coming in their case until it finally arrives.
So what do clients focus on every day while awaiting their result? They focus on the quality of their experience: Does their lawyer return their calls? Does he validate their parking or give them a hot cup of coffee while they wait in his waiting room? Does he communicate everything he’s doing on their case and bill them fairly?
And because they don’t have any “results” to share with others, they share their experience instead:
Bill: ”How’s your case coming?”
Wendy: ”Not sure. I’m still hoping to hit the jackpot, but my attorney is an ass and never calls me back.”
So what’s an attorney to do? Start by focusing on something more than just the quality of your clients’ results. Focus on their quality of their experience as well.
Here’s how:
1. Looking at the chart above, realize that for every client, there are two distinct parts of their legal matter:
- The Quality of their Result (QoR) speaks for itself, and is measured by how satisfied (or unsatisfied) the client is as their matter concludes. It is the thing most lawyers claim to focus upon, but in certain instances (litigation, for example) is either pre-ordained or out of the control of both attorney and client.
- The Quality of their Experience (QoE) is the measure of their satisfaction with everything else, including how they feel about their lawyer and the service she provides.
2. Ask some of your former clients (or pull some old files and do this yourself) to map out on the grid above how they felt about your representation, making certain their “Experience” measure is for everything that came between hiring you and their result.
3. Unless everything is in the upper right quadrant, get to work.
If you’re a lawyer who delivers a great experience — even with the occasional bad result — you’re likely to see more repeat and referral business from your former clients than some ”results-focused” lawyers who consistently get great results but make their clients miserable in the process.
Presentation Mistakes to Avoid
Funny, because its true.
Ignite Law is Back
I’m really excited to announce that Ignite Law is back at ABA TECHSHOW this year. It takes place the evening before TECHSHOW “officially” kicks off at 7:00 pm on March 28th at the Hilton Chicago.
The focus of this year’s event is Serving the 21st Century Client.
We’ve renamed the event LexThink.1 (to reflect the tenth of an hour increments most lawyers bill in as well as the length of the six minute speaking slots), but the format will remain largely the same: Twelve six minute/twenty slide presentations that are selected by the public.
The (still free) tickets will go on sale Monday, January 16th and speaker submissions will open up on January 30th. Voting on the submitted talks will take place beginning on February 24th.
We’re still tweaking the event site, but head on over to check it out.
I’m also happy to announce that JoAnna Forshee and Jobst Elster (from InsideLegal, the producers of the event) and Andrea Cannavina (from LegalTypist) have signed on again to help us deliver another great night of legal innovation.
We’ll have sponsorship information up in a few days as well, if you’re interested in that sort of thing.
We hope to see you there!
The Essence of Successful Blogging
I found this quote in this great list of inspirational resources for writers. It seemed to hit the “how to start a successful blog” nail squarely on the head:
Find a subject you care about and which you in your heart feel others should care about. It is this genuine caring, not your games with language, which will be the most compelling and seductive element in your style. ~ Kurt Vonnegut
Annoy Your Clients Less
I wrote a post over at the Attorney at Work blog about focusing on the things that annoy your clients and how to fix them. Check it out!
Ignite Law Update
I’m excited to announce that we’ll be doing Ignite Law again this year on the eve of TECHSHOW. We’re wrapping up the details today, and will be announcing all the details tomorrow afternoon.
Are Your Clients Happier This Year?
An interesting post over at the 37Signals Blog shares their year-over-year customer satisfaction scores. In short, they made their customers happier in 2011 than they did in 2010:
The great thing about keeping score is that you can track your progress. We started asking customers who contacted support what they thought about the interaction in 2010. We were thrilled to end that year with just seven out of a hundred being unhappy with the service (and 84% being happy, 9% being OK).
But I’m really proud to announce that we’ve dramatically raised our game in 2011. We’ve gotten the frown ratio down to just three out of a hundred (90% being happy, 7% being OK). That’s less than half of what it was just the year before!
Are your clients more satisfied this year than they were the year before? If you don’t know, why not? Are you measuring anything regarding client happiness? How about other client-focused statistics? How long did your average divorce take this year? Or how about your real estate closings? Did you do them faster this year? How about more efficiently?
If you’re not measuring things your clients would like you to be better at, how can you focus on improving?
I’ll have some more thoughts on how you can do this in an upcoming post. In the meantime, I’d love your thoughts: what do you measure that gives you real, actionable data you can use to improve your clients’ experience?
