How Technology Improves Interpersonal Client Relationships
For a law firm to grow, it requires a staple of healthy client relationships that invite opportunities for repeat business. Consider it to be the legal version of customer service; it’s through those interpersonal client relationships that firms build trust, establish authority, improve credibility and earn repeat business from happy clients.
In an effort to boost Legal Recurring Revenue across the firm, it’s important to monetize as many billable hours as possible. This can only be accomplished by maintaining and building upon interpersonal client relationships. Through the use of transparent customer service that delivers results to clients, your legal team can increase revenue across the board and lay the foundation for new growth opportunities in the future.
Why technology improves client relationships
There are two things you should keep in mind about the quality of service provided to clients:
- How quickly can questions be answered or challenges be solved
- Are there opportunities to increase billable hours charged to clients
The first point speaks to the need for fast, efficient solutions that are presented to clients whenever they bring questions to the table. The second point addresses the need for your firm to grow revenue opportunities through more efficient methods of providing customer service. Technology can address both needs by streamlining how your firm engages with clients.
Traditional recordkeeping is too time consuming
Let’s say a client asks about a particular record in the minute book. They ask to review the documents to address any potential concerns or misconceptions about what’s listed. Now, paralegals have to spend time finding, sourcing, and presenting those records to the client. If any changes are needed, those records need to be scanned, filed, and organized all over again.
Here’s the biggest challenge with these situations: it takes approximately 5 minutes for paralegals to scan, tag, and file a single document within an entire minute book. Suppose your client has multiple minute books and files need to be pulled, scanned, and re-tagged across all of them. How much time does a paralegal have to spend on these administrative tasks?
True costs of non-technological minute book recordkeeping
There’s two reasons that this is not an ideal working scenario. First of all, in order to provide exceptional customer service, your firm needs to present answers to client inquiries as fast as humanly possible. Taking a significant amount of time to simply pull or update existing records leaves clients waiting in the wind without answers to their questions. It could ultimately sour your firm’s reputation with the client due to the perception of being unable to meet their demands.
The second reason is that all of this time spent sorting through records reduces the amount of billable hours that paralegals can earn from their client relationships. Most firms spend up to $20k per year per legal professional simply to manage corporate records and minute books. All of those costs add up and, with limited time to directly interact with clients, paralegals are unable to earn as much Legal Recurring Revenue as they might otherwise be able to do so.
How to use technology to improve client relationships
By replacing these outdated processes with cloud-based entity management software, you can improve the quality of customer service delivered to clients in a way that opens the door to more billable hours available for your paralegals. Cloud-based entity management solutions offer a set of tools which represent the future of minute book and entity management. They allow paralegals to provide exceptional service and get back more of their own time to put towards billable hours and boosting Legal Recurring Revenue for the firm.
The best part of these technological solutions is that they make minute books and corporate records available to anyone with access to the entity management account. Suppose clients have questions but they’re not coming into the office to physically review records, in part due to the ongoing concerns about the COVID-19 pandemic. This is a more common scenario than you might think; over three quarters of business owners want to access corporate records from remote work environments. Cloud-based platforms allow those owners to do just that.
Are you ready to improve your firm’s interpersonal client relationships by using modern technology? Join the MinuteBox revolution so that you can improve customer service, increase client satisfaction, and create more lucrative paths to grow the size of your firm’s business.
