Did you mindfully design service to be a strategic element of your firm? Chances are you didn’t, or haven’t. But designing the service may well make the difference between a firm that survives the ‘lawpocalypse’, and one that doesn’t.
Nobody has the solution to the problems we believe that our businesses are facing. Marketers tell us to do one thing, technologists another, business gurus something else. We seem to be in an age when we have to be doing many things outside of core business, just in order to survive. Some lawyers believe robots will take their jobs, others that robots are the promised land.
Where in all of this thinking, are the people you are serving?
Somewhere in the middle of all of the things we ought to be doing, we have to deliver services to people. We have to do what we promise and what we’re good at. The challenge for law is to stop looking at its own bellybutton, and start gazing deep into its customers’ eyes. Just being a firm with great lawyers won’t be good enough in the long term.
If your firm is like the vast majority of businesses in Australia, the delivery of your service has been something of a default. Working out where that default has come from can be quite tricky.
Generally, though, the style of service that we put in place in our businesses comes from one of two places:
- Prior examples, in other firms or businesses in which we’ve worked, where things were done a certain way (and seemed to be the way things are done).
- Prior bad examples, of the kinds of things we hated and swore we would do differently.
But beyond this point? We spend our time thinking about the work that we need to complete, about how busy we are, about how much more business we need.
It’s pretty rare that we focus those questions on the people who come to us. We don’t often stop to wonder what they need to do, the work that they need to complete, about how busy they are, and what your service means to them.
Enter, Service Design.
Service design is the bridge between strategy and customer experience. It happens when you stop and ‘rethink, reimagine, and re-create every stage and aspect of interaction between customers and your company, regardless of what is being sold and whether a transaction actually occurs’.[1]
A consistent business is not consistent by accident, but by design. It requires us to be proactive in every sense. It’s a removal of friction, from the customer end. More importantly, great service is a result of it being woven into the fabric of your business. It’s not something that is at the whim of management, intentions, or even the culture.
If you don’t create it, it doesn’t exist.
Law isn’t designed to think this way. Most firms, which are ultimately run by lawyers, have never been introduced to this level of detailed corporate strategy or this level of product design. Most business models, even in law, learned from manufacturing: Where metrics are based on the quantity and quality of finished goods rather than the value of your interaction with customers.
That interaction is where the service happens. The quality of that interaction is the point on which the longevity of your firm rests. It’s not in the technology, the way you bill people, or even what kind of niche you target; though, your service design will consider all three. In the 21st century, what will make the difference between your firm and another one will be in how beautifully you’ve designed the service to remove friction from people’s lives.
You won’t instinctively know how to measure that value. In fact, it’s likely that even if you do have a clear corporate strategy for your firm (which many don’t), that you won’t have designed the service within it. Even the most customer-focused enterprises somehow seem to leave the client stuff out of their strategic documents; ultimately, it’s their downfall.
Customer journey maps are the plans and activities of the hour, it seems. But knowing who your customers are, where they come from, and how you capture them is literally just the surface. Delightful service design goes beyond that work and reworks the interactions at every stage, at every touchpoint, on that journey. It also considers service over a client lifetime, and not just ‘how do we bring them in’.
By going right back to the basics of great relationships, and standing in your clients’ shoes, you will be able to truly shift your practice or firm, and position it more strongly in the face of an uncertain future.
