Just about everything can be done online these days. With the internet phenomenon reaching the farthest places on the planet, no service is now beyond the reach of any potential customers. All types of businesses have now made their presence known online using the internet as a platform to provide the services. E-Commerce is contributing to a paradigm shift in the way business is conducted.
The legal support industry is one of the many industries who have made a sounding presence in the online market. Attorney services have recently flooded the market like never before. Legal support generally requires consultation with lawyers and prosecutors but gone are the days when a customer would have to spend time in first searching one and then making sure they are the right fit for their case. With online services, this is no more a problem.
The clients first must register with the firm for a nominal one time fee. This fee may include services for a month or an entire year depending upon the package selected and the client requirement. Next step is collecting and performing a conflict check on client details, including the name and contact details. Clients can then order the legal services they require and ask questions if necessary.
After the ordering process is complete, the service will request the client to mention his or her precise legal needs and objectives. As per the scenario, the service will then set up an online interview with an attorney wherein there will be dialogue during which the client and the attorney can ask questions to each other. Once the attorneys have thoroughly reviewed the information as provided by the client, they will be offering their final response in documents that can be downloaded online or shipped as hard copies directly to the customer’s address.
Since this is also a business, it will face the inevitability of churning customers. Customer churn in case online legal support business is those set of customers who never returned to sign-up on a law-suite that they may be pursuing, after having had an initial level of consultation with the backend team.
A few strategies can be implemented to reduce customer churn rates for online legal support.
Know your Target Customer Persona
Before implementing any marketing and engagement strategy, it is essential for the business to understand its potentially profitable customer base. Reviewing factors such as employment, demography, and income will help you align strategies directed towards the target audience. The better a business knows its target audience, the more it can appeal to the same. One way to build a better understanding of your target customer base is to use AI and machine learning on the data that you capture on your customers. AI/ ML helps you to correlate your customer’s identity data points with their behavioral data points. It enables you to segment the customers based on their likelihood of moving into the desired behavioral mode. If you are in a platform business, then this applies not just for your customers but also to the lawyers that you would like to attract and retain as the service providers on your legal support platform.
Personalized and Non-technical Customer Interaction
While in the customer’s shoes, the business gets a better perspective on what the client will need and how they can provide a satisfying service. The lawyers and attorneys representing the service should understand the knowledge level of the client and then interact as required. Not everyone would understand legal terms. The lawyers need to try their best in explaining the procedures to the client as simple as possible. It is crucial to record all customer and lawyer interactions so that you, as a business, can analyze those and build an insightful communicator out of it. This business involves many repetitive queries from the customers, and this is where AI and Machine Learning can play an important role. Preliminary consultations can be done using intelligent chatbots that have learned the domain through the customer lawyer interactions from the past.
Intuitive Customer Journey
While setting up a Legal support website online, the business needs to make sure that it engages the potential customers the moment they arrive. Certain factors can help provide such an engaging experience like giving an easy to use user interface for first time users who will be easily able to find about the lawyers or services supplied or having the essential content within a click or two in the landing page of the site. It all boils down to how much a client finds the site user-friendly. A website structure that is logical and simple will appeal to more clients and hence will be important in determining the success of the business, especially if the practice involves different legal fields. By using the data on cookie behavior, logged-in customer behavior, call-center, you can see the pattern of the preferred customer journey through the application of AI/ ML. The favorite customer journey paths on the website could be noted and created so that the target customer is better served improving their chances of revisiting and doing business with you.
Recommended Content
Customers will subscribe to a business depending on how much value it provides to them. So, it’s vital that the content provided on the online portal is of real importance to the potential customer. Conducting market-level research and then tailoring the content as per the results of the study will help gain target audience. Lawyers and attorneys are expensive, and hence, customers expect them to be experts. Customers are ready to shell out a premium given that they see the legal service provided meets the standards. The online site would need to reflect this expertise of the business through the content. The content could be in the form of summarized stories about past cases elaborated in nontechnical language so that customers can relate to it and feel comfortable to work with you. Based on the content engagement data and trigger points from within the content could be analyzed using AI and machine learning to understand what content to be recommended to whom so that their chances of engaging and thereby continuing the journey are higher.
Customer churn is inevitable in the times when customers have a lot of options available, and their attention span is low. However, controlling the rate of churning customer is very much possible with the data and application of artificial intelligence and machine learning. AI and machine learning bring out the insights for you to engage and serve the customer with relevance; the real value is when the customer perceives you as an excellent and proactive service provider.
Most online legal support businesses aren’t expert at AI and machine learning, and you don’t even have to be to have better customer retention, Datoin is for domain experts who want to drive better customer retention and experience using their data.