Change management and client investment

Many law firms have now implemented some kind of CRM system. However, that is far from the end of it. The system is only part of an ongoing process aimed at improving a firm’s relationships and services to clients. Dr Tom Kennie, a director at Ranmore Consulting Group and Rachel Collins, head of business development at Osborne Clarke, assess the ongoing development of CRM and how firms should manage the consequences of such a long-term investment.

Osborne Clarke is an international law firm with over 100 partners. It is a full-service provider and has had an impressive growth record over the past ten years.

The firm has a strong commitment to the enhancement of service quality and client management and, for a number of years, has conducted an annual client-satisfaction audit. The audit, conducted by an external consultant, has provided the firm with a benchmarked review of feedback from its key clients.

While the firm has an existing CRM framework in place, the findings from the 2002 survey indicated that clients felt even more could be done to enhance the process. This raised some important questions:

What do you do to further enhance the merits of client-relationship management (CRM) when you already have a well-established approach to managing clients?
How do you integrate the benefits of CRM technology without drowning in data?
What role can and should business-development specialists play in supporting the implementation of CRM processes?
How do you persuade busy partners to invest even more time in relationship-building activities?
Above all, as managing partner, how do you change manage the process?

This paper summarises progress to date in the implementation of CRM and some of the more generic lessons of experience for other firms seeking to enhance an existing, successful CRM programme.

Avoiding the pitfalls

From our joint experience, we have noted a number of potential pitfalls associated with the implementation of CRM. We characterise the most significant of these as follows:

The superficial response – often associated with partners perceiving CRM as the latest flavour of the month agenda from the management;
The shotgun approach – in which a significant number of unco-ordinated strands of activity are packaged together into a CRM strategy;
The cookbook compliance approach – in which an off-the-shelf solution is imported and imposed on a firm with no concern for the culture of the practice or the engagement of partners in the development of the process;
The technology take-over approach – which, as implied, is associated with the technology (which is important) dominating the implementation process.

In addition to the identification of some of the more obvious pitfalls, we also recognised a number of other practical issues. These included:

The need to align the process with the firm’s strategic direction and its business-planning processes;
The need to articulate the benefits of the process and the criteria by which the firm would assess success;
The critical importance of partner involvement in the design and implementation phases, and the need to engage a number of key players;
The need to clarify and further define the role of the client partner;
The need to manage the internal relationships between client partners and the heads of the key services – managing the matrix;
The appropriate use of technology to support (not lead) the process;
The need for support from professionals in the business development, IT and information services teams within the firm;
The need to ensure some early wins in the implementation process.

Recognising the pitfalls and practical issues was one issue; managing the process to avoid their effect, required much greater thought. What was clear, however, was that the approach would not be effective if it was simply announced and then launched onto an unsuspecting practice. A considered process of change management was crucial – to both shape the process and gain engagement from partners. We will return to this issue later. Some of the key lessons can, however, be demonstrated by focusing on three key issues: client investment, technology and the role of business-development professionals.

Investing in clients

CRM is now well established in most major practices – indeed for many firms, they are now in the second or third generation of the process. For these firms (as was the case with Osborne Clarke), one of the issues was how to re-emphasise the importance of client management where the process was already well established.

Two lessons became apparent at this stage. The first was to recognise that we wanted a more integrated approach. It would involve, when fully implemented, a number of new processes beyond those that already existed. Hence it would involve a step-change in the process, rather than being incremental in nature. To reflect this change, a new name was required for the process. The name “Investing in Clients” emerged and has proved helpful in describing the focus on the approach. It truly is about how to invest the resources of the firm in its key clients. It was also felt that the overall title would be a helpful signal to clients.

The second lesson was the importance of managing the process as an overall programme of activities. This has involved a clear articulation of all of the elements of the programme and the professional co-ordination of all the components by a programme manager.

The role of technology and the CRM toolkit

Technology is key to the implementation of any large-scale CRM programme. Fortunately, Osborne Clarke is a technologically sophisticated practice, well versed in the use of technology to support business processes. It has invested in the InterAction CRM software package and has also begun customising the reporting options to provide some valuable outputs from the data.

The introduction of the Investing in Clients programme did, however, offer an opportunity to ensure the potential of InterAction was realised. The programme approach also helped ensure that the rationale and benefits of the data could be fully emphasised.

To work alongside the software, a number of other tools were developed. These used, as a starting point, the Ranmore CRM toolkit. The toolkit is a series of diagnostic fact finding and analytical tools to help capture client know-how and use this to inform client review meetings. Rather than relying solely on their use as paper documents, several of the tools were automated so that they could help feed the InterAction database.

A final and important technological feature has been the creation of a dedicated intranet site to enable the sharing of client plans, client contacts and other client business know-how.

Overall, the technology support has been key to the implementation – but in a supportive rather than overwhelming manner.

The role of business-development professionals

Implementing the Investing in Clients programme is a major team effort. The co-ordination of the team and the building of a strong infrastructure to support partners in the development of client plans, and preparation for client-review meetings is critical. One aspect of this process is the need to help develop the latent talents of the business-development specialists. For some, this requires the development of a new set of skills. In this new role, the specialist becomes more of an internal consultant gathering intelligence and then undertaking a considered review of the client’s business. In addition to honing the hard business skills required for this role, the business-development team has also had to develop facilitation and consulting skills. To assist the team, a series of short interactive workshops were provided in these areas.

Facilitation of the process

Throughout the first phase of the implementation of the process, we provided a series of facilitated workshops to support partners with the programme. These have involved some training elements on themes such as:

Understanding a client business and business analysis;
Client planning;
Conducting a client review meeting;
Dealing with challenging client meetings.

In addition, significant time was spent on facilitating the development of client plans and rehearsals for client review meetings. The workshops were also opportunities to gain feedback on the progress of the programme and on the issues emerging as the programme progressed.

While the time required to run these sessions was an issue (half-day sessions), the significant benefits were the ability to maintain momentum. So often, when a major change is implemented it can run into the sand if the pressure for change is not re-emphasised. The workshops also offered an opportunity for peer pressure to be used to encourage all partners to keep up the progress.

Key change-management lessons

The ultimate success of the Investing in Clients programme will be judged by the strength, depth and value of the firm’s key client relationships – and ultimately on the business that accrues from this process. There is already evidence of this occurring and new opportunities emerging. In summary, however, a number of lessons are offered for those who are embarking on a similar journey – or who have done so – but are having less success. The lessons are linked to the recently published framework by John Kotter in his book on change management: The Heart of Change. He cites eight key steps – to which we have added our commentary:

Eight key steps to change management:

Step 1 – increase urgency. Creating evidence of the pressure for change is a key step. The evidence from the external client-survey exercise – particularly the trend data – has been of considerable benefit in this process;

Step 2 – build the guiding team. Creating a senior team that has visibly supported and guided the process has been vital. Of course, visible support from the managing partner is important but gaining the support of other key players in the practice has also been crucial;

Step 3 – get the vision right. The vision in this context has been articulated as a core component of the firm’s overall strategy. Demonstrating the value of focusing on, in this case, the top 40 clients and the importance of an industry-based sector strategy have both been significant steps;

Step 4 – communicate for buy-in. There is no doubt that one of the most difficult challenges is getting the communication right. How much? When is the time right? Where? What medium? Using all of the existing channels is important (internal newsletters, partner conferences, client seminars), but the visible recognition of the programme by senior members of the firm is also symbolically important;

Step 5 – empower action. Encouraging others to act, removing obstacles to help the change move forward and building confidence have also been important lessons. At the lowest level this has been about providing access to information but also about recognising and valuing feedback from team members at all levels about the clients business;

Step 6 – create short-term wins. A really important lesson has been the importance of demonstrating progress and communicating small wins as the programme has evolved;

Step 7 – don’t let up. As the initial enthusiasm diminishes, it is important to keep up the pace – to involve others and also support those who have been in the vanguard of the change. This is a key lesson where it can be so easy to either believe the CRM process is totally embedded or that another initiative has started to distract energy;

Step 8 – make change stick. To do so requires both embedded systems and processes that are viewed as beneficial. Several of these are now in place. However, to really make the change stick requires ongoing recognition and rewards to those who engage and promote the new approach. This will require more work – but again the first steps have started.

The final word – Leslie Perrin, managing partner

In common with many other larger practices, we have been involved in implementing CRM for a number of years.

Our initial approach involved a strong emphasis on client care and led to the introduction of our annual survey that evaluated client perceptions of our service. Over time this has provided a very effective benchmark of our service quality. We have also been developing the technological support to CRM through the use of a range of financial CRM software and other intra/extranet facilities. More recently we have been aligning our client management to more directly reflect our business strategy.

Last year we decided to further enhance our focus on CRM. We recognised that an off-the-shelf solution would not be appropriate (even if we believed that such a ‘solution’ existed). We identified that critical to us was an approach that built on our existing processes, was developed and tailored to the firm, and recognised the Osborne Clarke culture. We were also clear that whatever approach we adopted, we needed to build in processes that would ensure the long-term sustainability of the plan.

The response of partners to the adopted programme has been very encouraging. The facilitative style of engaging partners in a collective dialogue to further evolve our approach to CRM has been welcomed. The business returns from such a process do not happen overnight, but clear evidence is already emerging of new opportunities being identified. In addition to the financial merits, benefits have also been identified in relation to the confidence of partners to address difficult client-relationship issues – as one highly experienced partner commented: “I now know how to ask difficult questions, and how to respond more confidently when I’m asked a difficult question.”

Dr Tom Kennie is director of Ranmore Consulting Group. He can be contacted at: tkennie@ranmore.co.uk. Rachel Collins is head of business development at Osborne Clarke. She can be contacted at: rachel.collins@osborneclarke.com.