How To Map Your Law Firm Client Journey

Have you ever been lost in the forest?

Have you ever been lost, ever?

These days we have an app and a map for almost every journey we take, from raising a child to building a business.

And yet, the one journey that most law firm owners fail to map, is that of their own clients.

Let’s find out why mapping the customer journey is important, how to do it, and then cover how you can expand and apply it in your law firm.

WHY MAP?

At first glance, it seems like mapping the customer journey is another marketing mirage.

Mapping the customer journey in your law firm is not an empty gesture, but a legitimate and necessary step to ensuring your marketing’s effectiveness. How can you advance into the future or go anywhere new, if you don’t first establish where you are?

If you define and map the ways marketing brings business to your firm, and then track client experience, then you can measure marketing effectiveness, staff performance, client satisfaction, and find opportunities to reduce costs.

HOW TO MAP?

The first step to mapping the journey is identifying all the touch points and relationships that the law firm has with clients.

Use a timeline of your sales cycle and overlap staff and strategies responsible at each touch point.

A typical customer journey should cover these five client touch points; Awareness, Acquisition, Consideration, Service, and Loyalty.

Imagine having the answers to these questions;

• Who is seeing your marketing & referring business to your firm? Who is aware of your firm? How can you increase that?

• What makes your clients choose your firm over others? What makes you unique?

• What happens during the consultation that makes clients sign? Is there clarity in your materials, intake structure?

• Are client matters & cases being handled on time? Is there a particular issue that keeps cropping up with a certain paralegal?

• Is there anything your staff can do better?

• What kind of media do clients consume & how can you keep in touch after disbursement?

Well you can have those answers!

If you turn the above questions around and ask your clients & staff at your firm, you will have the beginnings of not only a customer journey, but also some amazing client experience data that can inform your marketing, guide future strategies, and more.

We have a FREE Client Experience Survey to get you started! -> DOWNLOAD HERE

 

 

GOING DEEPER

When you start documenting the touch points & experiences of your clients, you can see that every interaction matters.

But without editorial control, information overload cancels out the benefits of their being any helpful info to begin with. As a legal marketer working with a law firm, you can’t map out every single moment, but you can look to your staff for guidance.

At Sawaya Law Firm, to answer their top time-wasting questions, they partnered with Consultwebs to create an interactive timeline of their client journey, explaining every step of the way from intake to disbursement, in plain language.

Because I worked in-house at the law firm and personally created this campaign with the partners & Consultwebs, I will say, getting the content for this project took months. Thankfully, you won’t have to spend that much time learning how to do it. I’ll tell you how and in less time…right now!

• Create client survey based on the questions above but adapted for your firm.
• Send out an email to relevant staff at all client touch points, and ask them to provide their top ten client FAQs.
• Map out the client timeline against the case life cycle and all relevant touch points.

We decided on 14 client touch points that we felt could answer the most FAQs, help convert potential clients, pre-qualify leads, speed up consultations, and generate a sense of trust as well as bring down the anxiety of our current clients. Those touch points for our auto injury cases were;

Injury

Medical Treatment

Intake

Consultation

Retention Agreement

Creating a Case

Investigations

Case Manager Call

Meet Head Attorney

End of Treatment

Demand Letter

Negotiations

Settlement

Disbursement

Review

• Overlay the FAQ questions from staff, filter out the trends of client questions based on the touch point and then get the partners to answer those top questions as they explain each step.
• Edit these answers to the point that a child can understand them. We used an app called Hemingway – http://www.hemingwayapp.com/ which analyzes your content for grammar and grade level. We never went above an 8th grade reading level, and kept everything as short as possible.
• Once it’s ready to become an interactive timeline, get in touch with us here! We can do this! It’s easy!

CONCLUSION

There are so many ways to employ marketing these days, but very few avenues can guarantee marketing effectiveness as well as understanding your client’s journey, at your law firm, inside and out.

When you have the answers to your experience survey & client’s top FAQ’s, when you can define their experience, when you have a map, then you can speak plainly and provide the kind of guidance that attracts potential business to your law firm.

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