Articles

Why Your Legal Department’s Customer Service Matters and Ways to Improve It

May 30, 2023

Solution

Market Insights

An in-house attorney provides a positive customer service experience while answering a phone call.

The modern corporate legal department is more like a business within a business, providing legal advice and risk management services to the business’s stakeholders.

As a business, how would you rate your legal department’s customer service? While you may not think of customer service as a high-priority metric, like the number of claims resolved or deals closed, your stakeholders’ perception of the department is crucial for fostering long-term success as a business partner.

In this article, we explain the significance of customer service for GCs and their legal departments. We also share strategies for improving your department’s net promoter score.

Key Takeaways

  • Customer service for legal departments is not about always saying “yes” but, instead, is about building a positive relationship with business partners.
  • Prioritizing customer service provides benefits to the company but also to your legal team in terms of energy and talent retention.
  • Ways to improve your department’s customer service include understanding your company’s business and conveying legal issues in terms that matter to your stakeholders.

Reframing What Customer Service Is in the Context of a Corporate Legal Department

When you think of customer service, you might picture yourself communicating on the phone or through a chat system with a call center to resolve issues related to the purchase, use, or return of an item or service. Phrases like “the customer is always right” or “customer satisfaction guaranteed” might also come to mind. These phrases imply that customer service is nothing more than acquiescing to a client’s demands to retain their business and loyalty.

For corporate legal departments, this understanding of customer service doesn’t mesh. The client (i.e., your c-suite and other departments) will undoubtedly be wrong occasionally, and your job is not to tell them they are right anyway. Furthermore, your undertakings on their behalf will not always be successful. Instead, providing customer service as a legal department involves creating a positive business partnership with corporate stakeholders, which allows your legal team to do its job.

Advantages for General Counsels Who Prioritize Customer Service

Prioritizing customer service within your legal department can bring numerous benefits to the company and the operations of your legal team. On the company side, a positive customer service rating can do the following:

  • Greater ability to avoid and mitigate risk because stakeholders will involve your team early and often.
  • Remove barriers and silos across the company’s departments.
  • Improve the alignment between your legal operations and the company’s business goals.
  • Change the perception of your legal department from a cost center to a solution center.
Prioritizing the customer service of your legal department can enhance its perception as a business partner.

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Investing in your legal department’s customer service performance can also boost the morale of your team. If your attorneys and staff know stakeholders value their work, it can promote engagement, productivity, and talent retention.

Evaluating Customer Service in a Legal Environment and Setting KPIs

Evaluating the quality of your legal department’s customer service can be difficult because it is subject to the opinions and feelings of your stakeholders. Getting accurate, honest data on customer service (e.g., through a survey or other form) can also be difficult because of fears of anonymity, retaliation, etc. While surveys for determining a net promoter score and general customer satisfaction can be valuable, consider other KPIs that could be useful:

  • Are there departments, teams, or other structures within the company that legal does not have a relationship with?
  • How often does the legal department communicate with stakeholders?
  • Track the speed of your legal team’s response to requests (even if the response does not immediately answer the request but at least lets the sender know you received it). For example, does your team at least have a 24-hour response time?
  • Identify the common channels for new matter requests to the legal department.
  • Track the frequency of new matter requests from your stakeholders.
  • Identify the stage of new matter requests – i.e., is it a proactive choice to include legal or a reactionary step taken out of necessity? This is the difference between, for example, input sought on an employee policy versus handling an employee complaint after the fact.

3 Strategies for Improving Your Legal Department’s Customer Service Score

Improving the customer service satisfaction of your legal department requires a long-term mindset that begins with small acts that are genuine and consistent. Overall, legal departments should focus on a few key initiatives that could lead to greater customer service satisfaction from your business partners.

1. Understand and Care about the Business (Including the Problems of Non-Legal Roles)

Make sure your legal team knows the company’s history, mission, and values. More importantly, know how those things impact the way your company does business. This requires understanding the day-to-day roles and challenges faced by non-legal colleagues. A commitment to aligning with the business purpose can instill confidence in stakeholders and improve customer service satisfaction. Some ways to improve business alignment include:

  • Tours of other departments
  • Events that encourage inter-department team building
  • Contests or incentive programs that build corporate knowledge
Understanding the business was a leading priority for GCs from our 2022 survey and is a key part of improving customer satisfaction for your stakeholders.

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A fundamental language barrier exists between legal and non-legal audiences, which can be detrimental to customer service satisfaction if left unchecked. You might compare this to a company with primarily English-speaking customers outsourcing customer service to a non-English-speaking call center. Frustrations are certain to arise.

Attorneys often relay information laced with legal jargon and what-ifs that can be difficult for stakeholders to fully comprehend the importance of a legal issue or process. To ease this communication barrier, convey legal issues to corporate stakeholders in terms they understand, such as cost, time, financial risk, and public relations. This makes your advice practical and actionable for stakeholders.

The work of corporate legal departments is akin to the offensive line of a football team. Your efforts and wins for the company mostly go unnoticed. It’s only when you fail to protect the quarterback that people start talking. This a problem for improving the perception of your customer service.

As a result, GCs need to advocate for their legal department and regularly showcase the net positives they bring to the company. You can do this through annual reviews and budget meetings, to name a few channels. For example, an internal newsletter highlighting victories. Be sure to acknowledge the collaborations with other departments in this messaging so stakeholders know that your legal department’s successes are theirs too.

Learn How Morae Can Help Your Department’s Customer Service

Building sound relationships with your company’s stakeholders and becoming a trusted strategic partner takes considerable time and effort for already busy GCs and in-house attorneys. Finding that time can be especially difficult if your legal department’s operations are not optimized for efficiency.

Morae’s multi-skilled team of legal professionals provides a comprehensive set of services to help your legal department shine. Whether it’s customizing your Microsoft 365 to improve legal intake processes or consulting on legal spend with outside counsel, our experts are ready to help your legal department achieve its goals and provide exceptional customer service.

Schedule a consultation today.