Social Networking and CRM: the Next Step for Law Firms
[via knowledgeline]
Tom Baldwin, Sheppard Mullin's Chief Knowledge Officer, blogs about two new social networking software products which will enhance your firm's client relationship management system.
Contact Networks and BranchIT mine e-mail on your firm's own network, eliminating the privacy/security issues involved with an ASP. All law firms, particularly those handling cross-border transactions, must keep privacy and security issues foremost in mind. Remember, this past September, Clifford Chance's Paris office "accidentally leaked colorful descriptions of senior executives" employed by its client, Airbus, the aircraft manufacturer.
Baldwin says,
What I like about Contact Networks and Branch-IT is that these products address two crucial shortcomings of traditional CRM systems.
First, because they mine your firm's e-mail server and create individual contact records from e-mail your lawyers send and receive (filtering out spam and other junk mail) there's absolutely ZERO data entry required by lawyers or their secretaries - genius.
The second thing these systems do is offer various access levels to contact information which can provide lawyers a much greater level of control over the use of their contacts than in a traditional CRM system.
Contact Networks takes it a step further and maintains their own database of companies, along with the executives of those companies, and the system will attempt to match up (based on the domain of the e-mail) an e-mail address not only with a company, but with an individual person. Their database also tracks what industry/SIC code the company is in, which is great information [and] hard to manually keep in CRM.
That being said, these systems aren't meant to replace CRM, they are simply meant to offer a supplement for the all important 'who knows who' questions that arise. CRM is still needed to manage mailing lists, track opportunities, etc. But, if your firm is serious about leveraging its relationship capital, these tools shouldn't be overlooked.
So which law firms have adopted this new technology?
Incentive feature: BranchIT provides a tracking system to encourage and reward staff for sharing their relationships.
Feedback feature: BranchIT provides both employees requesting an introduction to a target individual outside the company, and employees holding relationships with the target individual a mechanism for rating their interaction with each other.
