Achieving CRM Success - What Is Essential

Once you have finished with your internal needs assessment, you are ready to consider solutions. One of the CRM ‘must haves’ for law firms is seamless integration with Outlook. Let’s face it, attorneys are busy. These people are balancing client demands - and sometimes demanding Clients – with critical deadlines and significant billable hour requirements, while being leg-ironed to their BlackBerrys and wading through a never-ending flood of e-mails. They will not adopt a system that requires them to change their business processes or sit in tedious training classes to learn new software.

But while attorneys may be averse to spending time ‘managing’ contacts in a new system, they live or die by their current systems for e-mail, calendars and contacts, primarily Outlook. In fact, for solos and very small firms, Outlook is often the primary - and sometimes the only - tool they use to manage their Client and contact relationships. As a result, any system that does not almost completely and seamlessly integrate with Outlook will not succeed in a law firm. This has been proven by the number of failed implementations of systems without this tight integration. 

This is also a reason to work with a CRM provider with experience in working with professional services firms and to select a system that has been built to accommodate their needs and processes.