Before you make a big decision that would impact your clients, try this simple client-relationship tip from Thrilling Your “Front-Row” Fans:
Pick up the phone and get their opinion on a decision that would impact them.
Simple, cheap and easy. Next time you’re thinking about making a change in your business, reach out to a handful of your best clients and see what they think about it. Explain the challenge you’re trying to solve and solicit any additional ideas they have.
By seeking their advice on major business decisions, you’ll show them how you value their insight and soften the blow of any changes that adversely affect them (like a fee increase). You might be surprised at how willing they are to help you make your business better.
Ryan Singer writes on the Signal vs. Noise blog about the importance of delivering a consistently great experience to customers, regardless of the complexity (or simplicity) of the thing you do for them. Though he’s talking about software, his basic idea is an important one for all service providers to remember:
Features can be different sizes with more or less complexity, but quality of experience should be constant across all features. That constant quality of experience is what gives your customers trust. It demonstrates to them that whatever you build, you build well….
I want a base level of quality execution across all features. Whenever I commit to building or expanding a feature, I’m committing to a baseline of effort on the user experience. That way feature complexity — scope — is always the cost multiplier, not user experience. There aren’t debates about experience or how far to take it. The user experience simply has to be up to base standard in order to ship, no matter how trimmed down the feature is.
How is this relevant to lawyers? Instead of letting the amount (or types) of work you can do guide your firm’s strategy, focus first on the minimum experience you commit to giving all your clients. Then, take on only the additional work that you can competently handle without compromising your client’s minimum experience.
I’ve been sharing some of my best ideas on how to design and facilitate law firm retreats and practice group meetings over on my new Law Firm Retreat Blog.
Here are some of my recent posts from the last two weeks:
What would happen if a major law firm appointed a managing partner with no legal experience? Couldn’t happen, you say? At the Henry Ford Health System in Michigan, CEO Nancy Schlichting named an executive from The Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company (and expert in service excellence) as the president of one of the health system’s hospitals.
Why hire someone outside of healthcare to run a major hospital? How about to jettison any preconceived notions while creating a “Hospital of the Future” that differentiates itself from the competition by:
- Has prototype rooms for planning and community input.
- Incorporates green features in the architecture and construction.
- Consists of all private patient rooms, including in the emergency department.
- Emphasizes wellness and healthy living.
- Combines traditional clinical care with complementary therapies.
- Creates a unique brand and inspiring staff to think differently.
- Includes family space in each patient room, including intensive care.
- Implements a new kind of food culture in health care.
- Putts a focus on the special concerns of the elderly.
And the results? Judge for yourself on the
hospital’s website – a patient-focused portal that every major law firm should replicate.
I’d love to see a law firm take such an innovative approach. Perhaps if there aren’t any former Ritz executives in the marketplace, the firm could at least send its management committee to one of the
Ritz’s Executive Education Sessions.
Jordan Furlong has a great post (inspired by me, he claims) on the Attorney at Work Blog site encouraging lawyers to write “legal” poetry, which he defines as “a single poetic expression of legal information.” Jordan suggests collecting the poems and then publishing them to give to your clients, which I think is a tremendous idea.
Here are a few of his examples:
It can be iambic pentameter:
“Class actions can’t proceed,” the high court found,
“Without an issue common to the class.”
They couldn’t find a unifying ground
Of bias, so they gave Wal-Mart a pass.
It can be a limerick:
A clever young Briton named Max
Thought he lived in a haven for tax.
But some new legislation
Brought much aggravation;
Our update here has all the facts.
It can be a haiku:
The breeze may be free
But you still need a license
For your wind turbine.
And it can be schoolyard doggerel:
If your will don’t have a witness
It’ll fail the test for fitness.
Give it a try. There’s tremendous value in stretching your creative writing muscles and learning to write in different ways. It will also give you something fun to share with your clients.
And if you don’t think poetry is worth your time, try this Haiku Elevator Pitch exercise instead.
Looking for a place to foster creative side projects and innovation, Microsoft has launched a incubation space for their employees called the Garage. According to this CNET article, the “Garage” is a workshop-type place that gives employees access to tools, a place to experiment and the opportunity to collaborate with colleagues who share similar interests and skills. It also is a place where some fun creativity can happen:
In addition to getting the new space, the Garage also hosts “science fairs,” where employees put together poster-board presentations to show off their creations. Judges, wearing white lab coats, select winners, who get to ignite a homemade volcano dubbed Mount St. Awesome as their reward. Microsoft has also begun holding “Garage weeks,” where business units stop working on Microsoft products. Instead, employees focus on pet projects. Sometimes, their creations have nothing to do with Microsoft’s business whatsoever. One employee spent a week working on a self-leveling skateboard, something of a Segway for the skate crowd. Sometimes, they’re only peripherally related, such as an immunization tracker application for Windows Phones to help parents keep tabs on the different vaccines their children had received.
This is a fascinating idea that has a place in almost any industry — including law. Imagine if a law firm set up a “Garage” for lawyers (along with invited clients) to think together on ways to bill differently, serve clients better and explore new practice areas.
If you had an opportunity to build your firm’s garage, what would go in it? What kinds of things could you accomplish if you and your colleagues had the time and place (and permission) to innovate and think differently about your business.
Mashable shares Seven Wining Examples of Game Mechanics in Action. The article talks about “Gameification,” which is defined as:
the use of game thinking and game mechanics to engage audiences and solve problems. In other words, it means taking the best lessons from games like FarmVille, World of Warcraft and Angry Birds, and using them in business.
My favorite example in the article was this way game thinking can be applied to common problems, like getting drivers to slow down on the roadways:
[The] innovative Speed Camera Lottery idea rewards those drivers who obey the posted limit by entering them into a lottery. The compliant drivers then split the proceeds generated from speeders. Richardson used gamification concepts to turn an negative reinforcement system into a positive, incremental experience. When tested at a checkpoint in Stockholm, average driver speed was reduced by 20%. If the plan were scaled across the U.S., the results could mean thousands fewer injuries, millions of dollars worth of reduced costs and substantial environmental benefits.
Could you use a similar theory with your monthly bills? Instead of just offering the traditional discount on bills paid within 30 days, offer much larger discounts to the first handful of your customers who pay. For instance, give the first customer to pay their bill a 20% discount, offer a 19% discount to the second customer to pay, and so on.
Instead of hounding customers to pay, you may instead be faced with judging which of your clients paid first — a tremendous problem to have!
I’ve been sharing some of my best ideas on how to design and facilitate law firm retreats and practice group meetings over on my new Law Firm Retreat Blog.
Here are some of my recent posts:
Giving feedback is hard, Whether you’re trying to give actionable one-on-one suggestions, or delivering an annual performance reviews, there’s a deceptively easy and powerful framework you can use to deliver meaningful, actionable feedback in a consistent way.
Based upon a conversation framework for children developed by Harvard’s Project Zero, See/Think/Feel/Wonder is an elegant, easy-to-remember way to give better feedback by completing just four basic sentences:
- I see ____________________ (Something about the object, person or behavior you can see with your eyes).
- I think ____________________ (What you think about what you see).
- I feel ____________________ (An emotion you experience because of what you see or think).
- I wonder ____________________ (Something you’re curious about or a question you have).
By prompting people to begin their feedback with an objective observation (I See), followed by critical analysis (I Think), an emotional response (I Feel) and a follow up question (I Wonder), it untangles the distinct components of criticism, and makes it more likely that the person receiving the feedback will understand it and respond appropriately.
Here’s an example on ways an attorney could use the framework to give feedback to a tardy client:
- I see that you’ve arrived late again for our court hearing.
- I think that you’re not taking this matter very seriously.
- I feel like you’re disrespecting me and the judge.
- I wonder if you’d like to continue with this lawsuit.
Here’s another way a client could use the framework to share their reactions to their latest bill:
- I see that you’ve charged me for three stamps this month.
- I think that you can afford to pay for stamps out of the thousands of dollars of legal fees I’ve paid you.
- I feel disrespected because you are nickel-and-dime me every month.
- I wonder if I should find another attorney.
When practiced and used regularly, See, Think, Feel, Wonder can change the culture of an organization and provide more actionable ways to drive individual and organizational improvement.
Here’s a Worksheet (pdf) that you can use in your organization to practice See, Think, Feel, Wonder everyday.
This Smashing Magazine article by Brad Shorr identifies five fatal copywriting erros that can ruin your firm’s website. His first cardinal sin? Making your firm’s site all about the firm:
Problem is, the rest of the world isn’t interested in your story. Customers don’t have time to admire your greatness. They’re too busy searching for ways to make life better for themselves. A high-level Web page answers one question of the reader above all: What’s in it for me? To illustrate, we’ll stick with products, although this applies to other types of pages as well. It’s not about you. A well-written category-level product page talks a bit about features, a little more about benefits and a great deal more about the experience.
The author suggests you create a “Word Budget” that limits the number of words you can use to describe the features, benefits and experience your product or service offers. Given 200 words on your firm’s home page, here’s how you should “budget” them:
- 50 words on the features
- 100 words on the benefits
- 150 words on the experience
Here’s why:
- Setting a “word budget” forces discipline. Not only that, it relieves the anxiety over having to determine how to approach each individual product page, thus eliminating one of the biggest causes of delay in Web development projects.
- Focusing on the experience forces you to think about the target audience of the page in question. The experience I described speaks to an operations person. If my audience is made up of C-level executives or purchasing agents, then I would need to describe a completely different experience. If I’m writing for all three audiences, I may have to rethink my word budget. In any event, having an audience in mind prevents a Web page from devolving into that cursed, watered-down, “everything for everyone” messaging that says absolutely nothing.
- The purpose of a high-level page is to get people interested in the product. Once they’re interested, they may crave more information about features and benefits. Perfect. Tell the long version of your story on a detail-heavy product sub-page. Companies need not neglect features and benefits; they just need to suppress the urge to hit visitors over the head with them the minute they walk through the door.
Here’s how:
- Before you start writing, collect feedback from customers and prospects. Ask them why they buy from you, why they don’t, and how doing business with you has affected them.
- Start with an outline. Associate every feature with a benefit and every benefit with an experience.
- Have a customer read a draft and then explain to you why they would want to buy the product. If the customer “gets it,” you’re a star.
- Do the same thing with a person who knows nothing about your product and industry. If that person gets it, you’re a rock star.
The entire article is worth a read, and after you check it out, head on over to your firm’s website. My guess is that it makes at least three of the five mistakes Brad identifies.
And if you don’t have the ability to make meaningful changes to your firm’s website, at least start with your bio, and use Brad’s 50/100/150 rule to make it better.
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