Relationship management touches every aspect of the business—from how you answer the phone to how you bill your clients. Create a client service policy for your firm and make sure every person on staff understands their role in relationship management.

Effective client service teams analyze their existing client relationships across every functional unit of the organization. Here are a few things to consider:

Staffing: Where ever possible, try to staff a team that mirrors that of the client and encourage everyone to develop relationships with their counterparts at the organization. Positive impressions don’t rest in the hands of a single person. Everyone on the team should be part of strengthening the client relationship.

Billing: Evaluate your billing process from the standpoint of your client. Do your bills go to the right internal contact? Are they formatted in a way that makes it easy for your client to process? Or do your bills frustrate your clients by providing too little or too much detail? If you don’t know the answers to these questions, ask.

Marketing: First impressions today are not always in person. They are online, often before any face-to-face interaction takes place. Today, a firm’s website is where a first impression is established. What does your website say about the firm? Is the content up to date? Does the look and feel of the site reflect the strongest attributes of the firm? For more on this topic, read, “When is a website more than a website?”

IT: Bring your IT professionals into the client team fold and evaluate what resources are available to support the goals of the team. Look at what internal resources you currently leverage to improve the overall efficiency in the way you work. Client extranets, simple project management software and experience databases can provide invaluable differentiators to support the development of the client relationship.

For more information about client relationship management, check out my article, “Lessons from the Trenches: Client Service Teams.”

Oscar Wilde once said, “You know more than you think you know, just as you know less than you want to know.”

When it comes to law firm marketing, the same can be said about your clients. In some ways you do know more than you think you know, although you may not have harnessed that information to benefit your practice. In other ways, if you haven’t taken the time to understand what makes your client base tick, you may know a lot less.

The more you can understand your clients, the greater the impact you will have on them.

A key to building strong, long-term client relationships, is to understand the trends, drivers and needs that impact client behavior.

Trends: What trends impact your clients’ legal needs? Trends typically fall into four categories: competitive, regulatory, technological, economic.

Drivers: How do your clients measure success? Success for business is often based on key metrics such as financial performance or shareholder value.

Needs: What keeps your clients up at night? Consider the risks they face with their current legal needs, costs considerations, the source of the problem, competitive pressures.

By taking a disciplined approach to studying the trends, drivers and needs of your clients, you will provide value to your client that goes beyond the specific legal matter you handle. This will position you for a greater share of work and help turn your clients into great referral sources.

For more lessons about client service teams, read, “Lessons from the Trenches: Client Service Teams.”

My first job was at TJ’s Big Boy Restaurant in Rochester, New York. It was here, at the age of 16, that I received my first formal training in client feedback.

As a hostess, when customers came up to pay their bill, it was my responsibility to collect and track feedback by asking, “How was your service today?” I then recorded the response on a form that I handed to the manager at the end of my shift. Every month, we received a report card and with specific areas in which we needed to improve.

What always struck me about that first job was that was the discipline that went into managing customer relations. They not only created a systematic way to collect feedback, they used that data to improve their business.

Like the restaurant business, the ability to deliver an exceptional service experience is central to the legal profession. Client feedback is perhaps the single most valuable investment a law firm can make to strengthen and expand existing client relationships.

But the reality is that too often lawyers give client feedback lip service. For some reason, lawyers have a hard time asking for feedback and an even harder time listening to that feedback once they receive it.

That is why I am a proponent of using a third-party to collect the feedback. A third party has the advantage of serving as an objective ear for the client. Equally important, a third party can help turn the feedback into action.

As my friend Ramona Cyr Whitley of Luce Forward tells her attorneys, “The only thing worse than not asking for client feedback is not doing anything once you’ve received it.” Client feedback is only as valuable as what you do with it.

At a global level, client feedback is the foundation for better understanding clients, making needed process changes across the firms and positioning your firm more effectively in the market.

At the individual client level, the feedback should become the basis for written action plans to strengthen and improve service going forward.

To read more about lessons learned from client service teams, check out my article, “Lessons from the Trenches: Client Service Teams.”

Next Time: Understanding your client.