INTERVIEW
Client life cycle
Exploring the World of CRM Michael Warren, VP CRM Practice, Wilson Allen, shares his insight into the world of CRM – from its benefits to its ever-important role in firms – both now and in the future. Give us a brief insight into Michael Warren and the route to your current role as VP CRM Practice at Wilson Allen? My educational background is in hotel and restaurant management; however, I pivoted early in my career to work with data. I was a researcher with Scottish Power and SEEBOARD (formerly South Eastern Electricity Board, SEEB). I helped them clean up their systems, which weren’t known as CRM at that stage, but client relationships were beginning to take centre stage. And utility companies were moving from thinking about customers as primarily being meters in their supply chain and were starting to see them as valued customers. From there, I moved into professional services. One of the challenges with the adoption of technology is that companies often rely on it to be sufficiently compelling that people will want to use it. This phenomenon is particularly true with CRM systems. As I got to know the dynamics that were at play within professional services, it became my area of specialism and has been for the last 20 to 25 years. Talk us through the Wilson Allen setup – how many offices, where, and who does what? We operate from seven offices across the United States, Canada, and the UK, and have consultants that support clients worldwide. We offer a range of software, strategic consulting, and technical services to help law firms optimise all stages of client life cycle management, including business development and acceptance, business operations and billing, and business intelligence and performance. One of the key areas we looked for from the merger with Wilson Legal was to identify areas of cross-collaboration to achieve a wider geographical reach. Historically, our CRM practice had been predominately based out of the UK, although we do have roughly a 50/50 split in terms of our UK versus Rest of World client base – that was difficult for us to sustain out of the UK. Another reason for the merger, from our point of view, was because we saw that business development was an area that firms would be heavily investing in over the
coming years. As CRM can’t succeed in a silo, we needed to understand more about the other systems that law firms had, which is, of course, where Wilson specialises. What are the key benefits to a company of a CRM system? Ah, the $64,000 question! One of the challenges around CRM is that it means different things to different people. Broadly speaking, there is a linear sequence to how you do, say, billing. You open the matter, you record the time, you send the bill. Marketing and business development don’t really work that way. Yes, there are linear processes within marketing and business development, so if you’re holding an event, you can’t send the invitations after the event has happened. But the way that people manage relationships and manage their book of business will vary from practice to practice and lawyer to lawyer. The benefit of CRM is that as long as everybody is on the same page as to what you’re trying to achieve, then there isn’t a right or wrong answer. But yes, if it’s done well, we see increases in customer satisfaction, crossselling and therefore, revenue generation. So, when we talk anecdotally about what business development looks like – they do work, and there’s evidence to demonstrate that it works. The challenge with professional services has always been that you can’t have a one size fits all. So firms often have not invested sufficiently in communicating to the rest of the business what it was they were trying to achieve, and therefore people have looked at it and thought, that isn’t for me, I won’t bother. What defines a successful CRM system – is it to help companies stay connected to customers, streamline processes, and improve profitability – or is there more? Broadly speaking, it’s about making sure that you seek opportunities to connect with the people that matter and, operationally, streamlining processes to make the marketing and business development processes simpler. One of the problems with early CRM systems was that they were too focused on operational efficiency improvements for marketing and business development. And although that’s a very good thing to do, do most lawyers care about it? And that’s why improving profitability is so important.
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