Your legal marketing efforts have taken hold in a big way. Maybe things are too good right now. There’s someone sitting on hold for 3 minutes, listening to the endless loop of elevator music. There’s a new consultation appointment in the waiting room; she’s been sitting there for 45 minutes.
Remember – good legal marketing efforts translate into this sort of thing. People who want to speak with you.
How long until the one on the phone hangs up, and the one in the waiting room gets up and leaves? Your legal marketing efforts start to spiral down the drain when that happens.
And even if you get to them before they cut and run, how happy will they be? Will these be people who are happy with the level of service you provide? Will they tell their friends good things about you? Will they hop onto Avvo, Yelp, Angie’s List, Twitter, Facebook or any other site and complain about how long you kept them waiting?
In other words, will your legal marketing backfire when it turns into a platform for bad word-of-mouth?
I know you’re busy. You’ve got an appeal due, a motion to draft, a petition that needs to be filed now. Right now. You’ve got a lawyer on one line, the court on the other, and you didn’t sleep much last night.
Your client doesn’t care. Nobody cares. Everyone cares about their own problems and schedules. You’re simply not that important.
So here’s the thing: when you set appointments, you need to give yourself enough time to complete them before the next one comes in.
Don’t schedule a 30 minutes consultation appointment when you know darn well it takes you 45-60 minutes to get it done.
Don’t allocate 3 hours for court time when it takes you an hour to get back to the office and the judge always has a long calendar call.
Your client has the right-of-way here. The client pays your bills, your salary, your overhead. Your client keeps your kids in school, gasses up your car every morning, and allows you to go food shopping.
Once again – you’re not that important. Get used to it. That’s why it’s called a “service business.” Either you serve or they will find someone else who will.
Is this the way it goes down every time? Are there fires that need to be put out, leaving a client cooling their heels in the waiting area? Absolutely. And when that happens, it’s your job as a service provider to be a big kid about it. Go out to the client, apologize profusely, and make the client happy. Have someone buy them a cup of coffee. Heck, take a few bucks out of your wallet and give them the money to do it on their own.
Take a cell phone number and tell the client to go for coffee. Offer to call them when the coast is clear.
Why? It makes the client happy. It eases the pain of being inconvenienced. And it lets the client know that you realize the fact that you’re not that important.
Photo courtesy of passiveaggressivenotes.
Good communication goes such a long way. My primary physician can usually see me within 24 hours, and when I walk into the waiting room, there are maximum of 2 other people in there. There is a sign posted prominently that says, "If you've been waiting longer than 20 minutes, please tell us." I rarely have time to sit down and ponder the merits of picking up a germy magazine before the nurse is calling me back. Average time in and out for simple stuff like a sinus infection? FOURTEEN MINUTES. Do they listen and spend extra diagnostic time when issues are more complex? Absolutely.This is a large practice with several doctors, and I see the senior partner. Hugely successful man – not a kid out of med school without a patient roster.If one general practice can manage this, why not the others?
So true! When I got out of law school the first job I had was the only one I could find – at a national bankruptcy law firm that actually assigned 6-digit numbers to their clients and treated them like they were in a factory. They would actually set up appointments in blocks of 3 potential clients every 1/2 hour and there would sometimes be only 1,maybe 2 attorneys available to meet with them. They figured one or two wouldn't show up so they just jammed the appointments in there all day. This obviously created an awful situation for both the clients and the attorneys. You were expected to "get them in, get their money and get them out". At times there were 4 or 5 people in the waiting area. I now have my own firm, and will never forget that you can't treat potential clients like that, especially if you want to get referrals for future business from them.
Amen to this. Doctors need to learn this lesson too.
You're absolutely right. Even if you offer the best legal advice in the city, if you left your client waiting for 45 minutes, they're far more likely to complain to their friends about how long they had to wait then to compliment your work. An interesting article I read recently talked about negative reviews for sellers on sites such as eBay and Amazon. It showed that when customers were offered money to take down negative reviews, they rarely did so, but if someone simply called them, apologized, and asked them to take down the review, most of the time they did.
True story from lunch yesterday:There is a sushi-and-other-Japanese-food restaurant around the corner from my office. There has been a fair amount going on for me this week. I needed to get back to the office and would eat at my desk. Because my office is new, this was my first time visiting the restaurant.So I went in, grabbed a takeout menu, and ordered one of the lunch specials to go. The hostess took the order and said that it would be just a few minutes. She then asked, "Would like a cup of hot tea while you wait, sir?" It was about 30 degrees outside and the wind was blowing up a storm. I was chilly even after the short walk. Of course I would like a hot cup of tea."I would love one, thanks."A couple minutes later the hostess came back, handed me the tea, and invited me to sit at an empty table. I sat and enjoyed my tea for maybe 7 or 8 minutes until my lunch was ready. Then I hustled back to my desk to eat while I worked.What did the gesture of providing a cup of tea on the house cost the restaurant? Close to nothing.What does it mean say to me, the prospective repeat customer? Everything.Complimentary tea at a spare table says, "I care about you as a customer. I see that it's a cold day out. I know you might be thirsty. I know it might take a few minutes to fix your lunch. I know you might feel more comfortable sitting here enjoying a beverage on the house than standing and waiting. I would rather than you sit here for a few minutes and sip some tea than have you think about how long it is taking to prepare your lunch. And I don't want to nickel-and-dime you over something like a cup of tea."Lunch was fine. Nothing spectacular, but certainly more than adequate. I'll go back of course.The power of a free cup of tea on a cold day.