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ROI 2010 Keynote - Ben McConnell on the Client Experience

by radiusofinfluence on May 25, 2010

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Ben McConnell, from Ant's Eye View and working with the Injury Board, discusses the importance of a positive client experience to the word of mouth marketing efforts of a personal injury law firm. He touches on the purpose and values of a firm, understanding and improving your "moments of truth" and the importance of staff and partner alignment.

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If he were alive today, A.N. Whitehead, the mathematician who wrote the Principia Mathematica and was a huge influence on philosophy and math between the 19th and 20th centuries, would probably be pretty startled, yet not that surprised about how social media is changing society. The age of the traditional media of newspapers, television, radio and advertising is being wrecked by social media and reshaped into something new and different which we don’t yet fully understand. Until we get a settling point a dozen years from now, though, there’s not much we can do but try to keep up. To illustrate this, I want to tell you about Bacon Salt.
How many people know about Bacon Salt? Has anyone tried it? (STORY) It was created by two friends who worked at an Internet company. They were at a restaurant one day, musing about how much they liked bacon. How about a bacon flavoring that could be put on anything? Their idea was born, and they got to work in the basement of one of their homes. Of course, they didn’t know anything about food products. Nothing about grocery. Nothing about distribution. No experience and no money. But they knew they wanted everything to taste like bacon.
After creating their product, they went to work on creating community. They started a blog. It’s filled with ideas and recipes on how to use Bacon Salt. That started to attract a following.
Then they went out to MySpace and started looking for people who identified themselves as loving bacon, then they friended them.
They did the same thing on Facebook, too. The upshot of looking for friends who share common passions is that there’s a greater likelihood of creating a friend online from a common passion THAN TRYING TO SELL THEM SOMETHING. It wasn’t long before people who loved bacon started finding the Bacon Salt guys and friending them. Soon they had thousands of friends.
They carried out the same mission on Twitter, which became the format for sharing where Bacon Salt was showing up in the world. Then fans of the company and the product used social media to tell the two guys that they wanted OTHER products with bacon flavor. That eventually gave birth to….
Yes, Baconnaise. Bacon-flavored spread. It may sound disgusting, but it sure has gotten a lot of free promotion on in the media, especially Jon Stewart’s Daily Show.
But you know what, it just took 2 years before Dave and Justin had the ultimate marketing opportunity…
An appearance on the Oprah show. There’s Oprah holding a jar of Baconnaise. An appearance on Oprah, of course, is the ultimate form of marketing for so many companies and firms, and these guys did it in two years because they relied on and participated in social media. It was their radius of influence that really catapulted them. One underlying value of the company is to have fun, so one April Fools Day, they unleashed their “newest” product….
It was meant as a joke, but the response from their fans in social media was, “Hey, If you turn that into a real product, I’ll buy it.”
The Bacon Salt story is an extreme one and not a common one. It’s a product of some good cultural timing, but it’s also a realistic example of what can happen when a company with very little money or experience can do when it’s focused on building a community – the community helps fuel its success.
Let’s look a little closer at the idea of radius of influence. You’ll remember from your geometry classes in school that circumference is the outside edge of a circle. Diameter is the distance between two points from the circumference, and radius is the distance from the center of the circle to the circumference.
In the Radius of Influence model, your law firm is at the center of the circle.
Your existing and past clients are scattered within the circumference of the circle. You have direct access to them because they’re inside your circle.
Your potential clients are outside the circle. You don’t necessarily have direct access to them, but there are a lot of them who are in a close orbit to you, or they have direct connections with people who are inside the circle.
What the Radius of Influence means is that influence emanates directly out from you and back toward you. When you create community, you create concentric circles that tie people inside the circle to people outside of it. That can be through social media, like the Bacon Salt example, but it’s already existing personal relationships. It’s what you experience already in existing client and professional referrals, but this is meant to show how powerful this can be as a focused strategy.
In the bigger picture, the Radius of Influence is how word of mouth spreads, it’s how evangelism takes root and spreads, too, it’s how people often find out about you based on recommendations from friends, colleagues or family members. It’s also the basis by which you can compete with law firms that outspend you 100-to-1 on advertising.
And here’s why this is valuable, especially in the destructive age of social media: the most trusted form of advertising is recommendations from friends. Recommendations from friends, or other peoples’ opinions online, are most often going to deliver you the best and most qualified clients. TV, radio and Yellow Page advertising is rampant in the law firm industry today, but that doesn’t mean it’s trusted, as this survey shows. So what are we to do with this? What if a law firm doesn’t have the resources or the inclination to spend heavily on advertising to reach out to potential clients outside of its circle – what should it do?
That’s why I’ve spent the last several months partnering with InjuryBoard to create the ROI Playbook. This is a playbook that’s focused on creating a community of fans from existing and current clients by focusing dilligently on the overall client experience. My management consulting firm, Ant’s Eye View, has spent a good deal of time interviewing law firms around the country to understand how they compete and how they operate. We met a lot of great, smart people who were very generous with their time and helped shape the thinking that went into this work. The end result is a manual with specific action items that firms can either do on their own or with the assistance of InjuryBoard. It wasn’t long before we were into our research that the law firm industry seemed to share some similarities with the Age of the Master Builders.
The Master Builders are responsible for some pretty remarkable buildings in history, like the Basilica di Santa Maria del Flore, more commonly known as the Duomo. Situated in the middle of Florence, the Duomo represents a major achievement of science and construction. Work began in 1296 with ArnolfodiCambio as the original architect. When he died in 1302, so did the knowledge on how to build it. For the next 100 years that process repeated itself: new architects arrived, then later died along with their knowledge. The Duomo eventually took about 200 years to complete, but this was the way of the master builder, where knowledge was hoarded and concentrated largely with one person, presenting problems of continuity that lasted generations. Does this sound like the partner management system at your firm, where partners and their assistants are often siloed? Where attorneys have their own responsibilities, sometimes their own staff and processes and the result is a cathedral of great knowledge, but that knowledge isn’t shared often outside of its doors, much less within its own chambers.
Construction today relies on the many of the same materials and techniques that the master builders of the 12th century pioneered, but using a lot more steel and glass. Today, buildings hundreds of times bigger than the Duomo are erected in a few years, not a few centuries. And they’re safe, and reliable, and they don’t fall down. Why? Basically, it’s one concept: Communication.
Communication and project management are the biggest technological advances in the construction industry of the last 100 years. Continuous communication between clients, partners, vendors and hundreds of workers helps ensure a rhythm of accountability, reliability and safety. This metaphor could extended to many law firms, where difficult cases can take years to complete and involve thousands, if not tens of thousands of documents. Law firms are very busy and very focused on their clients, but they often forget to communicate internally and with the rest of the world. Or with their clients after a case.
That’s why communication – internally and externally – is the next big innovation for law firm management.
There’s some data to back up this assertion, too.
A public opinion poll from a few years ago asked Americans what they thought law firms should do to improve their standing in the world. The usual stuff of lowering fees and doing more pro-bono work showed up there, as expected, but the top 2 rows are very instructive. This survey found that 8 out of 10 Americans want law firms to do a better job of communicating with clients. Improved commnication is second to educating the public on how to handle common legal problems. The good news from this survey a few years ago is that firms can do a better job of communicating with their clients AND educate them about handling common legal problems.
Here are five ways you can go about communicating with your clients, both current and past: 1. Focus on education, not advertising. Education is the sample that gets people to go for the entree.2. Communicate with your community regularly. Weekly, monthly or quarterly. 3. Put someone in charge as community facilitator. Someone who regularly encourages interaction and connection. 4. Find ways to have your community meet in person. When clients have the chance to meet one another, they share their personal stories and talk about their experiences with you.5. Participating with your community is marketing. It may become your most effective form of marketing because it’s the most authentic and genuine.
* Knowing who’s referring you. Thank each non-professional referrer personally with a note, a phone call, or a small gift.* Phone calls. A simple “how’s it going” months after the completion of a case is a subtle reminder that your firm can help others.* Emails. Individually, or as part of a larger “letter from a friend.”* Newsletters. The foundation for desired legal education.* Events. A simple cocktail party for a select group or an annual picnic for a larger invited group.*Invitations on Facebook. A simple and inexpensive way to maintain connection and communicate regularly.
Defining the client experience is to improve it. Here’s what we mean by that:
Moments of truth are those times when a client subconsciously decides if you are worthy of a recommendation to friends, family or colleagues. You can have more moments of truth than what’s listed here, but it’s important to know that each moment is shaped by how well the firm manages the emotion of a client during the interaction so they feel like they received the best possible service under the circumstances.
To know your moments of truth is to identify them, measure them, then work to improve them. To do this, create a map that identifies a key interaction a client has with your firm and ask them to grade how well you performed during it. Use a 1-10 scale: 10 is the highest available score, and 1 is the lowest. This chart, which is in the Playbook, also gives you a good idea of how each moment has the potential to generate good word of mouth, or bad word of mouth. With a few dozen surveys in hand, you’ll begin to know how well you’re doing during each moment of truth and which ones require improvement.
With your moments of truth in hand, then it’ll be time, if you haven’t already, to establish standards of service. The standards define how every person inside your firm, regardless of title or position, is to act or behave when working with a client. Standards of service are expectations that make it super-clear to everyone what you’re trying to accomplish with each and every client, or potential client, interaction.
Disney focuses intently on service delivery standards, as it should since it is in the experience delivery business. The company’s four service themes are part of the training every park employee receives, usually with very specific expectations. For instance, all park employees are trained to provide directions using two or more fingers in an open hand; pointing with one finger is considered rude in some cultures. The next step in this process is for you, your partners and staff to decide what your service standards will be.
I referred earlier to surveying clients to understand moments of truth. Asking clients to grade you is a very, very big part of delivering an outstanding and remarkable client experience. It’s important to note here that this doesn’t mean surveying EVERY client at every moment. It means surveying a portion of them so as to avoid survey fatigue and for you to get slowly build up knowledge in the practice, whether you do it internally or with the help of a partner like InjuryBoard.
Asking clients to grade you may seem daunting, or invasive, but it’s not. The clients who respond to your request for feedback will appreciate the opportunity to share. The key is to keep your survey very, very short. Two questions are best. The first question is quantitative: How likely are you to recommend us to friends, family or colleagues?Since most law firms largely depend on referrals, the quantitative will tell you how referrable you really are.
The second question, “Can you tell us why?” is qualitative and clients will give the most pressing reason, or reasons, for their grade. There’s really no reason to ask clients to grade you on the minutiae of firm operations, like the cleanliness of bathrooms or the friendliness of receptionists. If any operational item is a problem, a survey like this will help surface it quickly in this section. There are two big benefits of doing a short survey: One is that it’s easy to manage, and the second is that requires very little time of clients. It’s respectful of them, but it also makes them decide whether to put their own personal reputation on the line on whether they’d recommend you or not. The resulting answers are usually very honest and indicative of how well you’re doing, and how well you’re going to do in the future.
In continuing this theme of ease and simplicity, I recommend using a tool like SurveyMonkey. It’s extremely affordable and easy to use.
It will also put all of your survey results into easy-to-read chart form that can be distributed or shared with your partners, or even better, with your entire firm.
Purpose is your reason for being. It’s why your firm continues to work hard every day and do what’s right. It gives you competitive advantage because it helps keep everyone on the same page. Purpose drives everything. Does your firm have a purpose statement that’s communicated regularly? Does purpose guide your decision-making? Do you have a purpose statement?
If not, that’s OK. Four types of purpose can help guide your thinking: Discoverers seek action for the sake of advancing into new places. Excellence pursues what’s beautiful and elegant. Altruism is all about increasing happiness. Heroism is about action that demonstrates achievement, of justice, of fixing what’s broken.
A well-defined purpose drives a business forward. That can become a competitive advantage. Because purpose provides certainty, it inspires confidence and reduces risk aversion and fear. Here are six key points to know about purpose.
If purpose is your reason for being in business. Values are your ethical foundation for staying in business.Values are powerful drivers of how we think and behave. They tell us what is good and bad, right and wrong. They tell us the shoulds and shouldn'ts, musts and can'ts of business and life. They also help us decide which is more and less important.With everyone on the same page about values, and expectations of conduct built around them, then a firm is in a significantly stronger position, culture-wise, to compete against firms without articulated values.
Internet retailer Zappos.com spends more time focusing on its values-driven culture than most companies. It’s an approach that isn’t for everyone but then again, very few companies are like the customer evangelist-powered Zappos, which does over $1 billion annually since launching in 1999. (It was bought by Amazon.com in 2009.)
Zappos showcases its values on its website, too. My favorite among these is “Create fun and a little weirdness.” By weird, what it really means is to cultivate a sense of uniqueness, of allowing employees to be different and stand out. Zappos also produces a thick book each year that showcases the company’s values in action. To spread the word about its values, the company gives away a copy of the book to anyone who asks for one.
Client experience is a direct reflection of a law firm’s culture for a number of reasons…
A strong culture helps unify the team on delivering a great client experience. Building culture is a fairly mysterious process, but it can be done well under a unified purpose and well-defined values. (Purpose and values are not required to build culture, but they’re very helpful.) Here are six tips to help build culture: Keep it simple. Everyone must feel comfortable with the culture. Leave room for individuality.Make it global. Everyone, including partners, must buy in.Make it measureable. Create specific guidelines. Make them part of the performance assessment process.Train and coach. Incorporate culture elements into employee training and performance coaching.Solicit feedback and ideas from the team. Foster a sense of ownership and expand creative input by allowing employees to improve the client experience.Recognize and reward performance. Build employee motivation through formal and informal reward and recognition programs.
When a law firm fails, the result sometimes is a malpractice suit. Research by the American Bar Association since 1985 has found that personal injury attorneys consistently account for the most malpractice claims among all attorneys in practice. Firms with five or fewer attorneys account for roughly 70% of all complaints.There are myriad reasons why personal injury attorneys top this unfortunate list, but it most often boils down to missed filing deadlines and poor client communication. Improving the overall client experience with a strong emphasis on process and continuous, ongoing communication with clients can greatly limit the potential for mistakes or clients who get frustrated or angered by lack of communication.
Just to review, your radius of influece starts with you. At the top of the pyramid is your purpose, your reason for being, followed by your values. If you provide lots of training and regular communication about those two qualities of the firm and how they tie in to the client experience, then you’ll have a more holistic approach to delivering service that becomes word of mouth worthy. When you continuously evaluate how well you’re doing and communicate continuously internally and externally inside and outside your circle, then adapt to the changing needs of clients and the market, you’re in a much better position not only to compete, but for extending the value and life of your firm. Thank you!

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Ant’s Eye View at Ant’s Eye View 2 years ago