Keeping attorney clients is a crucial issue for legal nurse consultants. Legal nurse consultants make one sale out of twenty prospective client contacts. That means that for two contacts you’d have to meet forty contacts, or potential clients. That is a bit daunting.
You have to be willing to go to meetings, make calls, go to lunch, and meet all those potential clients. Even after you make that first sale you have to be willing and able to follow the client through the client development process and move them from potential client or prospect to become an advocate for you and your services.
One of the sad truths about getting a business going and maintaining it is that it costs five times as much money and time to attract a new client than it does to retain and resell an old client. So it really makes sense to resell your clients.
Keeping attorney clients – keys to success
What are the keys to client retention? Here are keys to client satisfaction.
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1. Be clear on what the client needs. Be sure you understand the nature of the assignment and the deadline so you give the attorney what he or she wants.
2. Be reachable. Attorneys are often working on short deadlines. When they leave a phone message or email an LNC, they expect an answer back, and quickly. Make sure you are reachable via email or phone.
3. Charge a fair number of hours. If you know you had a learning curve associated with a case, drop off some of your time.
4. Communicate with your client when you run into an issue. Maybe a learning curve is not the issue, but it is the quality of the records that is slowing you down. When a case is taking much longer than you expected, let the attorney know of the issue. Are records illegible, missing, or filled with data, but not meaningful information? Let the attorney know. This is essential for keeping attorney clients.
5. Be ethical. Don’t try to please the attorney at the expense of the truth. There is a tremendous amount of money invested in a case. Plaintiff and defense attorneys want to know the strengths and weaknesses of a case. They rely on you to be straight with them.
These practices will earn you the loyalty of your clients. You’ll spend less time trying to get new clients and more time on repeat business from current clients. Keeping attorney clients affects your wallet, peace of mind and success.
Pat Iyer MSN RN LNCC successfully built an independent legal nurse consulting business which she sold in 2015. About 80% of cases that came to her company each year were from repeat clients.
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