Law Firm Drives Growth with Quantitative Marketing Plan
Bagia & Associates uses a new survey tool designed by the CRC to determine the marketing engagement levels and identify alignment opportunities across their marketing plans, their employees’ perceptions, and their client experience.
New York, NY (OpenPress) December 26, 2008 – Bagia & Associates, a leading Philadelphia immigration law office, recently completed testing an innovative new survey designed to benchmark marketing engagement across its employees. The marketing engagement survey, designed by the New York-based Customer Research Center (CRC), analyzes alignment between marketing strategies, employee perceptions, and the client experience. Bagia & Associates developed a three-year growth strategy, based on the engagement survey, which will allow them to support strategic investments in their expanding market.
Jay Bagia, founder of Bagia & Associates, noted, "We’ve always been innovative in our approach to marketing our immigration services, but the analytical work by the Customer Research Center allows us to reach an entirely new level." The CRC marketing engagement approach includes a linear programming module that helps law firms to choose the greatest economic return across many different marketing channels.
"Law firms have many marketing options to choose from, but often lack the data required to make informed trade-off choices," said Steven Grant, CRC Managing Partner. Mr. Grant says his firm recently started working with law firms on marketing strategies. "We’ve done a lot of innovative work with wealth management companies and independent insurance agents, but this is our first foray into the legal field. We’ve found our optimization algorithms can spur a fundamental reallocation of marketing investments that drives incremental revenue growth."
The marketing engagement survey instrument is typically completed by everyone, in firms with less than 25 people, and by a statistically valid percentage of the organization for larger companies. The engagement survey covers brand identify, brand coherence, employee perceptions, and the current level of employee engagement in supporting the firm’s marketing efforts. The marketing engagement survey is completed along with a client experience survey so that both the marketing promise and the firm’s actual service to clients can be closely aligned.
Design Your Law Firm to Drive Revenue Growth
Customer Research Center identifies "brand coherence" as a key attribute for revenue growth in law firms.
December 20, 2008 - Law firms are missing a significant opportunity to maximize revenue growth if they don’t understand the rudiments of “brand coherence.” In its simplest form, brand coherence means that your strategy, your brand image, your marketing activities, and your client experience all “fit” together and reinforce each other. This concept is not just for the Fortune 50 global giants, the secrets developed at these firms can be applied to your solo practice just as easily, but for a lot less money.
A classic example of brand incoherence may help to illustrate the point. Sears acquired Dean Witter on the theory that people might want to buy a spark plug wrench or a new dishwasher and then wander down to aisle 10 and pick up some mutual funds. It’s like purchasing underwear from a gun store. If you’re looking for one of the two, it’s just hard to imagine that you’ll serendipitously decide to purchase the other. The Dean Witter experiment was a bust, but it did supply additional evidence that clients are looking for consistency and some sense of purposive ratiocination when they make a purchase decision. Even the smallest signs of incoherence make them stop and think, “If this firm doesn’t get something so obvious, do I really want to trust them to design my estate trust?”
Let’s look at the big pieces that need to be aligned: brand strategy, brand image, marketing, and the client experience. We can articulate a few design principles that law firms should use to maximize their referral and retention potentials.
Brand strategy requires a thoughtful assessment of what you’re really good at and how current clients and prospects perceive your firm versus the competition. This requires asking yourself, your associates (everyone in the firm, from the receptionist to the paralegals), and your clients to describe your brand. What strengths and weaknesses do they associate with you and the way you do business, as well as their perception of your various communication and marketing expressions. Typically this information is gathered from surveys and focus groups. From this information you develop a brand strategy. The brand strategy must merge current perceptions (which for many firms will be very abstract and ill-defined) with the direction you want to go. There must be an essential core of truth in this strategy that resonates with clients. If you try to pull this essential core in a contrary direction, you’ll lose the clients you already have in place.
Next, refine your marketing plan to incorporate the 2 or 3 key messages that were identified in the brand strategy. Every ad, every public event, every pro bono case should incorporate these few critical messages. Marketing investments should be carefully tracked to determine the return on investment gained from each activity. The total return should be assessed in the context of your firm’s revenue and growth rate. The reality is that most law firms budget way too little for marketing and experience very inconsistent growth patterns as a result.
Map the client experience yourself or rent a little time from a process design firm to build an impact map of your client experience. Tweak the overall design and your staff actions until the client experience is consistent with your brand strategy. If your brand is about “family” your client experience should reflect that. If your brand is about “unflinching advocacy” the client experience should say that just as clearly. The critical, and most difficult aspect of designing a client experience, is getting used to the idea that it must be designed rather than flowing forth from your good intentions. What magazines are in the waiting room? What does your afterhours voice mail message say? How does your stationary support the way your receptionist greets prospects? Everything is up for critical review and should be molded until it presents a single coherent, compelling, view to the potential clients and current clients. Surveys, comment cards, and focus groups will allow you to track your progress and make continual small refinements. Perceptions change over time, so the final design is never final.
Although the theory of brand coherence is fairly abstract, the recommendations that result are very tactical and, for the most part, simple changes. The impact on client referral rates can be staggering.
Next time you’re in a restaurant that just feels right, packed with people having a great experience who can’t wait for the next opportunity to dine there, think about the waiting room outside your law office. Are you close?
Copyright 2008, CRC
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Client Experience Strategy Drives Law Firm Growth
Customer Research Center explores impact of client experience on loyalty with Bagia & Associaties, a leading Philadelphia immigration law firm.
December 3, 2008 – Maintaining growth momentum during this global economic downturn requires companies to maintain extraordinarily high levels of client loyalty. A leading factor in client retention, add-on business, and high quality referrals is the client experience provided by law firms during their initial contact with potential clients. The research partnership between the CRC and Bagia & Associates will examine these impacts over the next three months to identify best practices for small firms focused on maintaining and enhancing revenue growth.
Bagia & Associates and the Customer Research Center (CRC) launched the study to determine the impact of the client experience on both retention and referral rates in immigration law practices. The goal of this research partnership is to identify the key drivers of extraordinary client experiences within both prospect and client populations to determine which enhancements to existing processes help companies build client loyalty.
Bagia & Associates, an immigration law firm based in Philadelphia, sees fundamental research as a way to maintain a competitive edge in a difficult economic environment. Jay Bagia, the founder of Bagia & Associates, sees a critical need for a deeper understanding of client expectations. “We have always provided extraordinary service to our clients based on our intuitive understanding of the difficult emotional circumstances and complex legal problems many immigrants experience. Now, we want to move that to the next level and develop an in-depth, quantitative understanding.”
”The first step in any process design effort, or marketing needs analysis, is to determine the underlying client expectations through a rigorous, statistically valid analysis,” observes Steven Grant, CRC Managing Partner. “Unless you know what clients expect, and design a standard process to drive success, all the other improvements can fall short of their full impact.”
The Customer Research Center, with offices in New York, Philadelphia, Stamford and New Jersey focuses on sales process optimization studies for the financial services industry. The partnership with Bagia & Associates represents their first foray into the legal industry and is expected to provide a rich source of benchmark data for future analyses.
For additional information on client experience strategies and sales process optimization please contact: Yvonne Brooks, Director, Public Relations, Customer Research Center or visit the CRC website at www.CustomerResearchCenter.com. Contact Ms. Brooks by phone (917) 568-3688 or email: ydbrooks@customerresearchcenter.com.
Bagia and Associates, an immigration law firm with headquarters in Philadelphia, can be reached at (215) 922-5354 or email jay@bagialaw.com. Bagia and Associates provide a full range of services to businesses and individuals on immigration law. To see more information, please visit their website at: www.BagiaLaw.com.
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