At this point, you have the basics of an online review strategy. We have started personal outreach to your best clients and going forward, you have created an email to send to your satisfied clients.
However, this just covers trying to gather reviews for your law firm.
I suggest that while you are taking these few days of this challenge to work on getting client feedback from your happy clients in the form of online reviews, you also think bigger about getting client feedback from everyone.
Oftentimes, negative reviews happen because there was a simple misunderstanding, but the client was not given the opportunity or place to discuss their concern or frustration.
The majority of complaints in online reviews for law firms are not for outcome issues but for the service along the way. For example, confusion on pricing, lack of timely communication, not using their form of communication (text vs phone or email vs. fax), etc.
By providing an opportunity and a place to provide feedback and vent any frustration, you can find problems in client communication or other issues in your law firm that you may not have been aware before they become a negative review online.
This is what continuous improvement is all about. I promise that if you give clients an opportunity to talk and you listen to their feedback more, your firm will naturally improve in client service.
One of the best ways to do this is with a survey questionnaire given to all clients at the end of their case, or sent a few times during their matter if it will be running for more than 3 months.
The questionnaire can be a paper form, and some law firms already have that. But we suggest using an online form on your website, and express that it is a private form and will not be shared outside of your firm.
Your form can be as simple as rate us on a scale of 1 to 5 stars and a space for feedback of why they rated you that way, or more complex to include a Net Promoter Score questions (NPS) and prompt for ratings or text feedback of different areas of your firm such as office location and appearance, staff friendliness, timely communication, etc.
You can learn a lot about little things you can improve that will lead to much better client satisfaction by simply asking for feedback.
The other great thing about this is that not only do you learn what you can improve, but you will also learn what clients are more likely to give you an amazing review on a public review site.
If they give you four or five stars or write some nice comments, then you can give them a call and send them a follow-up email to ask for a review. You can also get their written permission to use some of the positive comments as testimonials on your own website.
We have a tool that we use to help our clients that comes with our Reputation and Review management tools. Contact us for more information on our tool.
There are other tools out there like Get Five Stars and Birdeye.
Or you can use a free tool like Google Forms or Survey Monkey.
I suggest over the next few days, you think about where in your process with your clients that you can insert a “how are we doing” checkpoint with an email to review you on a private online form. Obviously, at the end of a case you would do this, but are there other steps in your workflow where you can learn from a check-in using a simple form.
Check out our tools (or the other tools mentioned above) or jump on a CompleteLegal Facebook Q&A session to get any questions answered that you have.
Tomorrow challenge is going to discuss one more way to help to build (and reward) a customer satisfaction culture in your firm.
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