Why empathy matters
Focusing on fostering a more human and emotional connection with your potential clients can show them that you care about them and their legal issue. This helps a potential client establish the trust and confidence necessary to make their decision to hire you faster and easier. Practicing empathy can also increase overall client satisfaction and differentiate you from your local competition.
Why automation matters
Automation is useful for streamlining and optimizing your everyday office operations. Using the right tools and resources can help you reduce human errors, improve your response time, and increase your firm’s efficiency. Automation can also free up you and your staff’s time from repetitive and mundane tasks and in exchange allow you to focus on delivering a better client experience.
How to combine empathy with automation to drive more business
Understand your client journey
To effectively balance empathy with automation for better client acquisition, you first need to map out your client journey. This involves identifying the touchpoints and pain points that lead to them hiring your firm. You will also need to understand the needs, expectations, and preferences of your potential clients at each stage of their journey and how those elements work alongside your firm’s brand and messaging.
Breaking down your client journey in this way can help guide your decisions moving forward on where to combine automation with empathy for the best impact. It can also provide better understanding into how this approach serves your client acquisition goals.
Choose the right tools and technology
Choosing the right tools and resources to support your client acquisition process is pivotal to achieving your business goals. These tools may be integrations for your law firm website, or other practice management tools that aid in office operations. To help make the right decisions on tools and technology for your practice, there are several things to consider:
- Features of the tool
- Functionalities of the tool
- Integration capabilities
- Your firm’s budget
- Your current resources
- Your business goals
In addition, it’s important to consider how the technology will ultimately impact your client acquisition process and its ability to help you strike a balance between empathy and automation.
LawLytics seamlessly integrates with over forty legal software services so that your website can become the hub of your business and improve your client journey. Some of the common tools that can integrate with your website and improve client acquisition include chatbots, virtual receptionists, client relations management tools, and practice management tools. If you’re new to the legal tech space, or wondering where your practice can incorporate more technology to optimize your business, a LawLytics product expert can help.
Know when and what to automate
In more recent years, attorneys have been leaning into technology to help them increase efficiency for office operations. Automating repetitive and simple tasks around the office can save time, money, and effort for you and your team and free up their time for more complex tasks. Automation can also help you to reduce human errors and improve productivity which can lead to better client satisfaction.
If you’re looking to automate more tasks for your practice, look to tasks that don’t require a significant amount of human judgment, creativity, or empathy. In addition, your newly automated tasks should not compromise your client service quality or your firm’s brand personality. For example, while you may look to automate your appointment confirmation emails, tasks like dealing with negative Google reviews are likely to require a human touch.
Know when and for what to use the human touch
While automation is helping attorneys run more efficient and profitable practices, it is not without limitations. Automation isn’t equipped to handle the complex and emotional tasks that require empathy and a human touch. For example, automation can’t handle tasks such as negotiation, persuasion, or emotional support.
Using the human touch for better client acquisition looks like building trust and confidence with your potential clients by showing that you care about them and their legal problems. For example, observe cues from your client journey to understand when the human touch is most beneficial to you and your potential clients such as an initial client consultation.
How to measure and improve your balance
To effectively balance empathy and automation for better client acquisition, it’s helpful to have a system for testing and evaluating your strategy in order to optimize it. This is first done by measuring your client feedback and reviews to evaluate client satisfaction. Then, you can utilize metrics and analytics to evaluate your ROI and effectiveness. With the presence of historical data over time, you can begin to adjust your strategy and make comparisons in order to find the most effective balance between empathy and automation for your firm.
