April 25, 2007
CRM and the Client-Focused Law Firm
Over at Juris when they talk about customers (and prospects), they call them “THE FORCE”. If you are a Star Wars™ fan, you know that the Force flows throughout the universe influencing all things. It is an apt description of law firm clients—those the law firm exists to serve. Law firm clients are the law firm's only source of revenues. They give the law firm an opportunity to produce results for the benefit of law firm partners. May the Force be with you!
As basic and fundamental as that concept is, law firms lag behind the business world when it comes to CRM, Customer Relationship Management. Many have confused CRM with software. It is not. Naras Eechambadi, CEO of Quaero (www.quaero.com), a marketing performance management and technology services company, recently wrote, “When CRM efforts ‘fail’, it is often because companies look to technology to provide a silver bullet and are disappointed when it fails to deliver.” In a separate article, Dick Lee, founder and principal of High-Yield Methods, went further: ”If we've learned anything over the past 15 years, we've learned that successful CRM starts with customer-centric business strategies. Plus we've also learned that technology does not enable strategies directly; rather, technology enables business processes that implement strategies. All we have to do is get these basic facts straight—and "get it" that we don't even talk technology until we fully address strategy and process.”
CRM is a state of mind. It is a strategy. It has to be an unshakable mindset at the top of an organization and must be widely accepted throughout the organization as cultural core belief. It can not be compartmentalized or delegated. Francis Buttle, an Australia Professor at the Macquarie Graduate School of Management, put it this way: "CRM is, of course, a cross-functional business discipline. It sits nowhere, but it belongs everywhere. It could be claimed by marketing, IT, operations or strategy subject-matter experts, but it is generally owned by no one."
The organization must first believe that its purpose is to serve the interests of its clients. If it unabashedly does so, then it will achieve success and reap the benefits. All decisions and all processes have to place the client’s interest first. You can not do that effectively unless the organization’s systems place the client at its center, and that is what CRM software is designed to help the firm do by keeping track of firm-wide client activity and sharing that information organization-wide.
A key is to understand that CRM software is only a tool in support of the law firm’s customer-focused strategy. The strategy comes first. Software like ContactEase™ available from Juris Alliance Partner Cole Valley Software, Inc. comes next.
Morepartnerincome.com is sponsored by Juris, Inc. For information about Juris® products and services for increasing law firm performance and partner income, go to www.Juris.com.
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Filed under Technology by Tom Collins
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