The second UKLTA (www.uklta.org.uk) online forum took place this week, where our expert panel shared their top tips for Client Communication & Confidentiality, considering how communication has changed over the past few months and how firms can adapt and thrive.
Our next panel “Wills & LPA’s During Lockdown” takes place next Thursday at 5pm and you can book your place here.
Chaired by Harvey Harding (PM Law), our panel members Catriona Wolfenden (Weightmans), Nigel Stott (Hudgell Solicitors), Rob Hosier (inCase), Keving Bishop (etiCloud) and Douglas Orr (novastone) gave some great insights for firms considering how to leverage technology to improve client communication.
Some of the key insights included:
- Law firms are leveraging technology to communicate with their clients more than they ever have before. To an extent this is due to present circumstances, but also due to changing customer expectations in the way legal services are being delivered.
- Lockdown highlighted weaknesses in client communication, with respect to on-premise IT and telephony equipment, as well as sending and receiving documents by post when there was no one in the office to receive them. This has brought about a realisation for some firms, that they need to be much more in touch with how business processes can be improved through greater use of technology to communicate with consumers.
- Where traditionally some firms have worked to bring their teams around to new ways of working using new technology slowly over time, there have been instances during lockdown where teams have had no choice to adopt new ways of working overnight, and the rollout of the technology has still been a success.
- Migrating hosting and telephony services to cloud providers means greater support and flexibility for smaller firms who don’t have dedicated IT teams. For firms with an in-house IT function, it frees up time for them to focus on other projects that improve the service to internal and external clients.
- The world of customer engagement has moved to a messaging centred world and firms need to ask themselves how they are going to embrace that world. This is how firms will be engaging with people more and more in the future (no more “telephone tag”).
- Clients were already ahead of law firms before the pandemic – wanting to communicate with firms through instant messaging tools and through social media platforms, and many firms have been slow to adapt to this.
- As consumers are now largely comfortable with instant messaging apps, asking them to move communication out of insecure email and into a secure communication tool will be relatively painless for them.
- Tools that allow the client to communicate in a way that they feel comfortable, and which the firm is happy are secure and information is kept confidential are going to become more prevalent in the future.
The recording of the event is available online here for the next seven days – so catch it while you can. Our next panel “Wills & LPA’s During Lockdown” takes place next Thursday at 5pm and you can book your place here.
This article was submitted to be published by UKLTA as part of their advertising agreement with Today’s Conveyancer. The views expressed in this article are those of the submitter and not those of Today’s Conveyancer.
