Some thoughts on customer service

Early in my career, I worked in a place that regularly left clients hanging.  I was the new guy, and many of the firm’s clients complained to me how they would go days, if not weeks, without hearing back from the office.  This seemed crazy to me.

At another office early in my career, the firm had the policy of “never let the sun set on an unreturned phone call” (this was before email was supercommon).

Which firm do you think had happier clients?

The service profession as a whole is plagued with a bad reputation.  Add in the public’s general dislike of lawyers, and far too many people are dissatisfied with the service they get from their law firms.  Some firms are simply understaffed and try to churn out every last client.  Often the thought is, “the more clients we get while using the least amount of staff will equate to the most profit.”  To some degree this is true, but only if the staff gives extraordinary service.

Most firms employing the “high client / low staff” model behave like the first firm I mentioned above.  They have tons of angry and unhappy clients.  The clients feel lost and uneducated about their cases.  I hear from those clients almost every week and tell them that I rarely take over someone’s case, and that their lawyer will call them back.  I feel badly for them because if they hired us, they would never feel that way. 

How hard is it to return a call or email the same day when you are properly staffed?  Not very.  At the worst it should be the next day.  Although it happens, it’s rare for a client to call us just to say hi.  They are frightened, or confused about an issue.  From our perspective, 95% or more of the time it is not a legal emergency.  Our perspective does not matter here.  From our client’s perspective it IS an emergency, and they deserve to hear back from their lawyer within 24 hours.  The rule at our firm is that everyone will hear back from us the same day, unless they call after 4 p.m.  They’ll hear back from us even if we don’t know the answer yet.  It’s amazing how helpful it is to a frightened client to know that their lawyer got their message and is trying to figure out an answer.  In very rare instances (I can’t remember the last time this has happened actually), our clients will hear back from us the next day.  When we discover that we are not able to promptly respond to client concerns, it’s time for us to hire someone new.

If poor service firms took less clients and did extraordinary work for each one, they would learn that a smaller number of happy clients is far more profitable than a long stream of angry clients.  Like any business, happy clients refer other clients and the firm is not regularly putting out the fires of angry clients.

It’s a really simple thing, this phone call and email returning stuff.  I don’t understand why it’s so uncommon.  Why wouldn’t you want your clients to love you?