We all know that first impressions matter. I’ve worked with lawyers for a long time, and I know how hard they work to make a great first impression when they meet a client.
However, this meeting is rarely a client’s first experience of your firm – that comes earlier. Today, first impressions are often made on your website and via your contact email, and clients have high expectations…
79% of consumers contacting a law firm expect a response to their enquiry in the first 24 hours (Source: Clio). However, the reality is very different. Another study by Clio found that 67% of law firms they contacted didn’t even reply to an initial contact.
Unfortunately, the reason why these emails aren’t replied to is often disorganisation. Time is short, leads are missed, and customers get inconsistent and slow communications.
So, how do you improve this onboarding experience, and make sure every new client has a great first impression of your firm?
It comes back to organisation, and in over 20 years of working in the legal sector, Clio is the best tool I’ve used for streamlining and structuring onboarding.
Clio Grow – A legal CRM for onboarding
Clio has been designed specifically for law firms, and Clio Grow is focused on onboarding and CRM. It will help you to create workflows, automate documents and make appointment bookings.
Introducing this structure means you can create a workflow for tracking leads through your pipeline to ensure that new customers are responded to. It also helps you to save time by using automated workflows, email templates, and checklists.
A step-by-step guide to Clio Grow’s main features
- Automated workflows – These are essential for creating consistency and speeding up the process for your support staff and work really well for the initial intake part of the pipline. Example workflows include emails, appointments, and forms. You can easily create workflows from templates or design them from scratch.
- Checklists and tasks – These help you to track progress on your onboarding-related actions. You can create tasks and assign them to team members, use checklist templates to create lists of actions and mark tasks as complete once finished. I find the tasks function so useful for making sure no important actions are missed and love that you can assign a task to another member of the team to action.
- Clio Scheduler – This is an online appointment booking tool that can be used by your clients or your colleagues to create appointments and even take payment for them using Clio Payments. You can create different appointment types and easily manage booked appointments.
- Email templates – These are probably the biggest time-saver for me. Standardising and templating your communications means clients always feel updated and you can easily collect the information you need from them. It can be used with intake forms, T’s & C’s, welcome emails etc.
- Document templates – Like the email templates, these are great for ensuring consistency and completeness. It means that Terms and Conditions and Engagement Letters can be promptly sent out for signing, with matter details populated via merge fields to save time. When signed documents are returned, these can be synced over to Clio Manage once the matter is converted. The templates feature also allows you to use merge fields to populate the document.
Top 3 reasons why I use Clio Grow for onboarding
I use Clio all the time for my own client onboarding and we regularly help firms to set up Clio Grow so that they can improve their onboarding processes. Here are the top reasons why I love using Clio Grow:
- Everything is in one place. Before Clio, I would have had to switch between different tools and saved documents to achieve the same result. Clio Grow keeps everything together, meaning it’s much harder to miss a step. I love onboarding clients through my own workflow and checklist.
- Consistency. Through templating and automation, all your customers have the same quality experience. As your processes are refined over time, you update your templates and this leads to a continuously improving process.
- It saves time. We’re all busy, and onboarding is an important but often repetitive process. Using Clio Grow reduces the time spent on document and email creation, and also helps speed up filing, and tracking actions.
- The Pipeline gives you a birds eye view of what status all your client projects are at.
Get help with setting up Clio Grow
When you work with us to set up Clio Grow or Manage, you’re getting much more than just technical support. We understand law firms and the way they work. We’ll take a look at your current processes, whether that’s the intake, client onboarding or associate onboarding to see where we can improve the process as we work on integrating it into Clio Grow.
We’ll help you to map out the flow of these processes before creating the workflow, checklist and templates. We can also provide ongoing support, including with Clio Manage, which is Clio’s CRM tool for active clients and cases.
To find out more, book a call with us today.
