Customer relationship management started off as a systematic way to keep track of interactions, improve support, and increase sales. Saying that CRM strategies and tools have reached beyond their initial purpose and exceeded everyone’s expectations would be an understatement. Nowadays, there’s an applicable solution for virtually every business, niche, and industry, legal practice included.
Here’s why your law firm needs one, and how it can redefine your management.
Make Influx of Clients a Happy Occasion
With good work come fame and recognition. With fame and recognition comes more work. It’s a cycle that all law firms aim towards, but only some can handle. Don’t let it be a vicious one – the sooner you equip your employees with a right set of tools, the easier it will be for them to manage it all later.
CRM for law firms can handle a comprehensive range of different tasks and responsibilities, but everything begins with its core functions. The client database, which is typically empowered with sophisticated features for interaction management and invoicing, is of immense help to all legal firms.
There isn’t a spreadsheet good enough to allow you to easily manage all the necessary data. Manual entries are not only tedious, but they also require plenty of time and energy. On top of that, every repetitive work leaves space for human errors and administrative discrepancies that, as a law firm, you cannot allow.
Customer relationship management tools automate nearly every part of the process, thus saving you time and effort needed for case resolutions and other burning matters. The best of them are process-based, subjecting client data to long-lasting operations.
Streamline for Busy Times
When CRMs are the topic, automation and streamlining are two words that cannot be avoided. The first makes the second possible, but not only when it comes to client interactions. If feature-rich and comprehensive, cutting-edge solutions can optimize the law firm’s performance in many other ways.
We’ll talk more about case management and finances in the proceeding, given the fact that they are the most important tasks on every law firm’s plate. For the time being, we want to focus on daily operations at large, and understand how CRMs can help you deal with copious amounts of workload.
The best CRM tools are the ones that make integrations with other systems like Outlook or Google Drive seamless. The employees should be able to use them at any time, from any place without too much tab shifting or any maintenance. The data should be centralized and systematically organized.
When all of this is in place, legal practice management becomes nearly effortless. Centralization provides transparency, while transparency allows managers to keep track of everything that’s going on within the firm. Both simple tasks and complex cases are easily managed without any time or effort.
Keep Your Cases Managed and Secured
Case management is awfully intricate, but it still isn’t something that process-based CRMs cannot handle. The process is here similar to task management, providing both the centralization of data and systematic transparency needed for keeping everything on dot, even in case of multiple participants.
What’s great about legal CRMs is that all case data is safely stored and protected from misuse. These systems are fully compliant to your role-based document access policy, as they allow your case managers to limit rights to certain employees.
Take Proper Care of Finances
In all aspiring businesses, and law firms are no different, finances present a challenge that has to be solved with utmost care and accuracy. Regardless of how many clients you currently have, and whether or not you intend to grow, an efficient tool for budget management is simply a necessity.
As an in-built feature, such tool exists in all the best CRM systems. Every part of this complex and ongoing process – from client balance insight to job costs reports to automatic and manual time tracking of billable time – is made easy, while all the financial data is made foolproof and kept safe from abuse.
Engage, Acquire, and Convert
Since law firms require a steady flow of clients too, effective customer relationship management and marketing must not be underestimated. Luckily, CRM tools can help you with this as well.
Marketing automation is one of the most sought-after features in CRM solutions, exactly because it allows firms to put their advertising cycle on autopilot. Systems like bpm’online connect to social media without any additional integration, and help you to build campaigns in only a few easy steps.
Running a successful client-facing business without some help from customer relationship management tools is pretty close to impossible. The people that come to law firms are not cases, but individuals with specific problems and needs. You need to delight them with your efficiency, professionalism and care at each touch-point, which is now easy to do with the best legal CRM.
