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The benefits of mapping the client journey
One director discusses how mapping the client journey at the firm can lead to effective and innovative ways of advising them.
Jess Feyder
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Recently, at the Smokeball Spark 2023 conference, Talya Faigenbaum, director at Nest Legal, discussed how she uses human-centred design principles to build her firm.
Human-centred design offers the ability to create innovative new solutions that are rooted in actual client needs, Ms Faigenbaum explained.
“To get started with your client journey mapping, it’s important to know who your clients are and where they’re coming from.
“Are your clients being referred to you by other professionals in your network? Are they finding you on Facebook? Are they coming to you from community forums or community groups?” she asked.
“Understanding their journey to find you will help you build a quality service that caters to their specific needs.”
Ms Faigenbaum gave an example of how this unfolded in her practice.
“After running our source data referral codes, which we do on a monthly basis, we noticed a trend that our family law clients were coming to us from other professional referrals.
“They were coming from financial advisers, mortgage brokers, accountants, as opposed to, let’s say, family violence, crisis centres and support services,” she explained.
“This indicated to us that some family law clients had a certain level of sophistication and comfort with technology that perhaps some of our other clients didn’t and that we perhaps weren’t catering for in the way that they needed.
“Traditional legal approaches in family law is to get your client signed up right from the beginning on a full-service retainer and to advocate for their interests all the way through, but clients were telling us something different.”
“They were saying to us, we are semi-autonomous help seekers. What we want from you is to help us fill our knowledge gaps, we want to be able to navigate our family law, separation, or divorce journey on our own, but we want you for certain touch points to help us along the way,” Ms Faigenbaum explained.
“So we got creative, and we designed a suite of bite-sized services that allow clients to interact with us, get the advice that they need, get solutions to their immediate problems,” she said. “We found this has been really helpful and very successful.”
Another way of mapping a client’s experience is through pipeline mapping — which is thinking about how easy it is for your clients to engage with you, said Ms Faigenbaum.
“Your calls to action, are they easy to use? Are they recognisable? Can clients work out how to get in contact with you? What about your website? Is it contemporary?” she asked.
“Make sure that your clients are responded to because you want their first interaction with you to be a memorable one in the best way possible.”
