Reading the Clues of Engagement: 3 Ways to Use IQ to Counter Client Flight Risk

Understanding how engaged clients are with their law firms can provide important clues in helping law firms retain clients, according to a new LexisNexis InterAction IQ E-Book titled: 6 Surefire Ways to Impress Your Legal Management Committee and Optimize your Team’s BD efforts.

By identifying those clients that are most valuable to the firm and understanding which of those clients has had the least level of engagement with partners in the firm, BD professionals can begin to develop a client flight risk dashboard to better address those clients.

What’s more, according to LexisNexis data, the risk of losing a client drops to less than 10 percent when clients have relationships with five or more partners in the firm. In other words, the more clients are exposed to partners in the firm, the more likely a client is to stay with their incumbent firm

It sounds simple enough. However, the process requires that attention be paid to important daily interactions between attorneys and their clients.

The InterAction IQ feature can assess a client’s level of engagement with the firm by giving the client relationship a score that quantifies and measures the level of engagement based on an attorney’s frequency of contact with a client. In addition, InterAction IQ can help BD professionals identify gaps in who the firm knows and help discover engagements that may otherwise be unknown, due to contacts not entered in the firm’s CRM database or an attorney’s contact collection. This ensures that important engagements are not overlooked.

InterAction IQ can also help BD professionals to know how effective their client marketing strategies are working by factoring in client marketing activities or meetings and weighing them as part of the overall engagement score. In addition, InterAction IQ can identify whether client “target levels” are increasing or decreasing. Here are a few ways InterAction IQ can help BD professionals to inform the client engagement process:

• Track the Effectiveness of Client Marketing Efforts. InterAction IQ takes into account any marketing or one-on-one marketing communications aimed at clients which are logged into the system, such as clicks on a link from a marketing communication or website, which InterAction IQ also takes into consideration to determine a client’s or prospect’s level of engagement with respect to those efforts.

• Use IMO to Factor Client Meetings into the InterAction IQ Score. Provided the firm uses the InterAction for Microsoft Outlook (IMO) feature and is auto logging meetings for certain clients or prospects, those too will be calculated in the score.

• Identify if Target Levels are Increasing or Decreasing. By enabling users to create automated searches in the system either by looking at engagements with number of people in the firm or by looking at engagements with people at the company, InterAction IQ can help BD professionals determine if their target levels are being met. InterAction IQ also tracks score changes so members of the BD team can see where engagements are increasing or decreasing.

Ultimately, all of this data can be used to determine not only how engaged the firm’s most valuable clients are with the firm, but also to identify those clients which pose the greatest flight risk to the firm. From there, law firm BD professionals can begin an important dialogue about how to immediately re-engage those clients.

There’s clear proof, after all, the more clients are engaged with their law firms, the better.

This post is by Carla Del Bove, who provides support to the business of law software product line based in the LexisNexis Raleigh Technology Center.