11 Tactics Driving the Best Client Service

Deliberate client service beats all other approaches to client service. Combining the best-known practices with the right tools, training, and activities drives excellent client service. Here are the 11 strategies and tactics top-performing law firms are embracing:

1. 1. Dedicated Business Development and/or Client Service Executives. These client-facing professionals work with relationship partners to cultivate the relationship and business. The BTI Client Service 30 boast more than 40 of these individuals.
   2. Place client-facing professionals in key administrative roles, especially in matter intake and billing
   3. Using professional CX designers to design a better client experience
   4. Adopt, promote, and measure performance against clearly defined client service standards
   5. Train all partners in client service — and then train the rest of the firm
   6. Client Teams with teeth. They have a clear leader budget, plan, and metrics — including a revenue goal
   7. Deep, fully funded industry groups with dedicated attorneys becoming repositories of industry knowledge
   8. Formal processes to verbally share exchanges of ideas, and client solutions to new problems — and later share with attorneys within the firm
   9. Client feedback at scale. Conducting between 70 and 250 client interviews in a single wave or spread out over 12 months — including qualitative insights and quantitative metrics. Aggregate results are shared with all partners.
   10. Embedding aspirational language in internal communication: for example — I am out of the office but to provide you with excellent client service the following person can provide immediate help
   11. Adopting client service minutes

Note the lack of technology or AI.

Client service comes down to human behavior. Each strategy and tactic requires human interaction and behavior. Any one of these strategies makes an outsized impact. Adopting more than one puts you even further ahead — and drives proportionally more new business. This relationship between client service and new business is one of the few certainties in today’s uncertain world.

Want to talk about these? Reach out at mrynowecer@bticonsulting.com.