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Presented at the 2017 LMA Annual Conference, by Lynn Skoczelas, Lilian Tomovich, Maggie T. Watkins, and Susan Letterman White

Summary by: Brian C. Dare, Chief Business Development Officer, Strasburger, for the May 2017 LMA Southwest #LMA17 Conference Recap.

Session description:

Companies of all sizes are now shifting their focus to the customer experience (CX) to retain clients and impact the bottom line. Through this moderated panel, you’ll examine what these companies are doing and how law firm marketers can implement similar programs while gaining different industry perspectives.

Topics included:

• How companies are building CX strategies and what they look like
• What the legal profession can learn from their experiences
• Implementing your own CX programs
• Tools to aid in the implementation and transformation

Session summary:

• Developing a vision for people to follow. – should be aspirational and inspirational
• Establish pillars of excellence and align all standards to it – performance, operations, etc.
• Communicate it to audience – be loud and clear to get buy in and build ownership among people
• Cynics and skeptics need to be questioned and possibly exited
• Use the advocates as champions to promote internal excellence.
• Develop an employee satisfaction survey to gather input, feedback and use this information to prioritize goals and messaging
• Have to have honest conversations about results, prepare to be vulnerable, and be willing to take action
• Guest/customer experiences require discipline no matter which industry you’re in
• Think about diversifying offerings and don’t just assume that people will buy in
• What do you want the leaders and employees to do to impact the client experience?
1. Have a clear understanding of your brand purpose:
• Who you are?
• What you stand for?
• What do you want clients to think of your firm?
2. Conduct a survey to define and refine
3. Leaders and employees need to be accountable for delivering the experience – provide training on standards and provide resources
• Net Promoter Score – evaluation will drive compensation
• The psychology of the business is critical because the change is cultural – not process. They require leadership. Process can change in months. Culture takes years to change. Have to engage the leaders to create and communicate
• Rational arguments do not influence emotional buyers.
1. What do you really care about?
2. Have to engage clients, lawyers and staff in the process
3. What are the “burning issues” and fears for these leaders?
4. Want to go somewhere different and better – what does that look like?
• Lawyers truly care about relationships – have to have feedback, especially when its personal and individual
• Use client data and performance data to develop strategies

• Find the advocates and work with the difficult resistors. Build buy-in by establishing action teams – each with a separate task designed to improve culture
• Set “must haves” to establish a standard of experience
• Don’t focus on what’s wrong – but focus on what’s going well and do more of that. There are always going to be problems or issues – but highlight the positives and create an emotional appeal
• Promote message from leadership and talk about the Journey so that this is repeated consistently and becomes a part of the culture.
• Make sure new employees hear stories to help build engagement
• Harvest stories about the “experience” to help spread message
• Enable people to share information and build consensus
• Establish a change management office to help institute company-wide initiatives
• How to communicate?
• When?
• When?
• Gather feedback and applying to plan
• Look for the “Defining Moments” that you can share and talk about related to the guest and employee experience, such as:
• Getting offer letter
• First Day at the company
• First All Attorney Meeting
• Introductions to clients
• How to justify the investment in change?
• Be clear about what the goals are
• Revenue
• Growth

• Plan for introducing new processes
• Data collection via appreciative inquiry – what’s going right? What do we do well?
• Build trust internally – plan needs to be specific on how to implement
• What are we changing?
• When?
• How will it impact individuals?
• What do you want them to do?
• Create training to help people get invested and adopt best practices
• Find a point of entry to create engagement
• Listen and look for new skillsets to introduce

Next steps on building a great client experience:

• Be very clear on brand purpose. Who you are, what you do, why you do it, etc. to continuously drive differentiation and preference
• Who’s like-minded in the firm? Partner with them. If you’re asking people to step outside of their comfort zone then you must too
• Focus on what’s right – must include leadership and communication
• Leadership, power and politics – if you’re not aware of who the influencers are then your initiative will suffer
• Data collection, analysis and decision-making are critical aspects of setting strategy
• Create loyalty and relationships to stay on top of what clients want, need and care about
• How to get the lawyers to care about brand?
• Engage leadership to help make it happen
• Tap into the individual – everyone must see value and WIIFM
• What are their priorities? Understand their motivations and align initiative benefits accordingly