When it comes to Customer Relationship Management (CRM), most law firms don’t have well defined procedures in place and almost certainly don't have good habits around CRM. For years many law firms have relied upon Excel spreadsheets, email inboxes or physical paper to record prospect information. They are usually pretty good at keeping "some" client data in a practice management system. They have to to look after client money after all!
Implementing effective CRM strategy can prove problematic; effective training is required and even then it’s difficult to encourage users to repeat tasks to build complete client profiles. We’ve written one of our tips booklets on the application of effective CRM in Law Firms, for those of you who'd like more information, which can be downloaded from our website.
The difficulty of implementing CRM made the article published by Computer Weekly very interesting; a new open source CRM solution with built in “CRM gamification” techniques has surfaced this month which claims to “engage users at every level”. Encouraging your staff to consistently record client contact data and information is a difficult issue. Through the use of incentives, which according to Zurmo is its "game engine", this problem is overcome as users are encouraged to repeat CRM procedures. Features would include rewarding points, reaching levels and achieving badges relating to performance.
We have at least two clients, one UK, one international, who are already doing this. BD activities translate into points and we all know what points make.
For Conscious Solutions (and many of our happy clients), SugarCRM is the answer to an effective CRM system. A couple of our clients have implemented a rewards based system to encourage the logging of client information, and to great affect from what we've heard! Have a think about systems that could be implemented to improve CRM productivity.