Committed to client satisfaction

The latest developments in client-relationship management at UK firm Berwin Leighton Paisner. By David Rough

At its formation, as a result of a merger in May 2001, Berwin Leighton Paisner (BLP) made a commitment to client-relationship management (CRM), through the launch and implementation of a firm-wide programme. The aims of the programme were to:

Promote a better understanding, internally, of the benefits of an improved and professional approach to relationship management;
Increase levels of client satisfaction and retention and, therefore, enhanced profitability through long-term relationships.

In the subsequent five years, various elements of the programme have revolutionised the way staff in the firm view client service, which has resulted in a shift in service quality across the board. Undoubtedly, CRM has been a very real contributing factor to the firm’s improved performance.

Why is CRM important?
Buyers of legal services in corporate organisations are very much aware of the market. They know which firms are most suitable for different lines of practice, they will cherry-pick specialists as appropriate and they often operate legal panels, enabling them to benchmark firms against each other. They are generally loyal to their suppliers, but just doing the work to a high standard may not be good enough. In an undifferentiated market, client service has become a source of competitive advantage.

While the principles of customer care are appropriate to all clients, the programme has focused primarily on a relatively small group of key supporting clients – a policy justified by their disproportionate contribution to the business. BLP is not alone in recognising the application of the 80:20 Pareto Principle, but with a healthy mix of clients of different sizes, operating in a number of sectors, the ratio in many firms is likely to be nearer 90:10. And if 10 per cent of clients are responsible for 90 per cent of turnover, their work is bound to absorb a great deal of the time, attention and well-being of a significant number of people in the business.

What is CRM not?
CRM is not technology. While there are many sophisticated contact-management systems that share information, track leads and record activity, their use enables or supports CRM programmes, rather than drives them. If anybody offers to sell you a CRM solution, don’t believe them – you can’t buy CRM.

Features of the CRM programme
There are numerous elements that have contributed to the success of the CRM programme at BLP.

Feedback and research
CRM is very dependent upon feedback from key decision makers in the clients’ businesses. In addition to quarterly, or half-yearly, meetings between the client partner and the client, qualitative interviews are conducted at regular intervals by a professional third-party researcher. These provide an opportunity to stand back from day-to-day conversations involving ongoing work and focus on service issues. Despite some early nervousness, client partners have been pleased to receive constructive, mostly non-critical feedback, which produces information and opportunities. We have also bought into ‘syndicated’ research, which provides access to a wider group of decision makers and gives us the chance to benchmark data from our own clients against the market.

Action plans
Informed by the research, action plans are prepared setting objectives and outlining contact programmes. At this stage, key-performance indicators are often agreed with the client covering service levels and management of work.

A dash of realism
The programme was launched with a small group of 15 clients. Over-ambitious plans to start the ball rolling with 50, or even 100, are unlikely to succeed, while the whole organisation becomes paralysed with meetings and processes. Likewise, it is important to acknowledge that all client relationships have different needs and require individual approaches – any attempt to impose a prescriptive boiler-plate approach would also be doomed to failure.

Establishment and involvement of client teams
In most cases, the client partner had ‘emerged’ as the person who originally brings in the client or does most of the work. Establishment of the CRM programme enabled the opportunity to review whether the right people were in place and, equally as important, to broaden that involvement to other partners and associates. Not only does this help to spread the responsibilities but it also strengthens the relationship through development of peer-to-peer contact points and avoids the risk of fall-out at the ‘centre’. It is not a particularly new model but this has been referred to as moving from a bow-tie to a diamond position (see Figure 1).

Key-account planning
Although the client partner meets regularly with the client team, it is valuable, sometimes, to arrange more involved planning sessions with the aim of digging more deeply into the relationship. This might include quite challenging discussions in areas like succession planning, composition of the client team and growing ‘share of wallet’. It is often helpful to use an external facilitator to run the session, who can bring objectivity to the discussion and ask uncomfortable questions.

Secondments
The use of secondees is one of the most valuable relationship tools in the CRM kitbag. Although they can be a big resource commitment, they work on so many different levels for all parties that they are always worth exploring.

Extranets
We have developed a large number of private extranet sites for our leading clients. Although they all use the same start point, each has been tailored to suit the needs of the user – some have been set up for clients to access billing or matter information, others hold static documents and some offer an ‘Ask BLP’ service, which enables clients to post questions to the firm’s know-how team, to be answered within an agreed time frame.

Training
As well as one-to-one sales coaching, BLP partners and staff have been involved in extensive programmes of client service and transaction-management training. In both instances, these programmes were based upon the findings from feedback and focused on areas of service delivery regarded as important by clients, and in which they had identified room for improvement in performance.

Obstacles
Inevitably, introduction of a new initiative requires a certain investment in time to become part of the culture but, in many ways, an aim of the CRM programme was to bring some management discipline and process to a commitment to client care that already existed within the business. However, there were, of course, some obstacles to be overcome.

Time
The old enemy – partners and associates increasingly find themselves with competing demands on their time. For example, billable hours, business-development activity, technical and know-how training, and responsibility for the development of their teams. More time spent in meetings would not have been generally welcomed. It was important, therefore, to limit the number of internal client-team meetings and to spread the responsibility for different activities across client teams. This approach has proved to be a success and, in turn, has helped to widen the feeling of ownership and involvement beyond that of individual client partners (see Figure 1).

Tangible measures
Fee income is not the sole measure of success but, in an environment in which billing figures are so important, other performance measures take time to gain recognition. Over the long term (three to five years) it has been possible to see fee income growth from CRM clients and, ultimately, that has
to be a key measure of the success of the programme. However, there are other ways to measure this success, which may, for example, include access to a greater number of new contacts, or an increased number of opportunities to be invited to pitch for new lines of work. It is sensible to set your own challenging, but achievable, objectives and encourage all involved to work towards them. Finally, to recognise and reward the value of non-fee earning activities, including those relating to CRM, improvements to partner appraisals and the remuneration structure have been introduced.

Record keeping
The introduction of the CRM programme aimed, in part, to monitor and pull together details of the activities geared towards a particular client. In most cases, client-care activities have been undertaken for many years without the necessity to share or record information, but it has been important to the success of the programme to have made maximum use of our contact-management system. InterAction technology, which can be accessed by everyone in the firm, has proved useful both in the recording of activities and in the relationship functionality it provides.

The future
While a great deal has been achieved through the introduction of a formalised CRM programme, the world does not stand still and, as more firms embrace the principles of CRM, that particular source of competitive advantage is eroded. So, moving forward, we should always be seeking improvements in current practice and, in particular, looking more closely at:

The role of non-fee-earner account managers. As relationships grow and become more complex, there are compelling arguments for relieving partners of some of the non-project responsibilities and devolving them to professional account managers. Some firms have gone some way down this route and it works well for many clients;
Propensity modelling. This is a more refined form of market segmentation, which attempts to profile common characteristics of clients and predict the likelihood of others requiring similar lines of advice. This is an area in which technology can definitely assist and help us to reach a position where CRM can be redefined, as I heard recently, as customised relationship management.

Many studies, from Bain to Harvard, have demonstrated that it is more profitable to retain and grow existing customers than it is to acquire genuinely new business and our CRM programme has gone some way to ensuring that the firm is focused on the type of work that ensures its future health.

At its base level, CRM is an extension of common sense and good manners. Most human beings would prefer to deal with others in a polite, responsive manner and most business people would recognise the value of developing deep, long-term and profitable client relationships. However, none of this can be left to chance – a CRM programme helps to focus everyone on activity that really adds value and introduces some rigour to the process.

David Rough is head of client management at Berwin Leighton Paisner. He can be contacted at david.rough@blplaw.com